SUN IN CAPRICORN

Gilgo Slade is the concentrated essence of Huey Long, himself a caricature of a dictator in the making, whose personality still survives in Louisiana's rotten politics. The whole loathsome record of ""Louisiana hayride"" is fit subject for the satirist pen, and Hamilton Basso, speaking out of his knowledge of his native state and its people, draws the whole fantastic circus in a brief, fast-paced story of it can happen here. He has compressed the venality, the fantastic unreality and cruelty of the pattern into a quick build up and sudden death, against which is told a love story between a scion of an old parish family and a lovely unknown, both innocently framed to make capital for Gilgo Slade's peephole artists. Not an important milestone in Basso's career, but a clever bit of writing, and entertaining -- if disturbing -- reading.