PRESUMED DEAD

A former war corresondent in Indochina, Jean LartÉguy has been fictionally documenting the Vietnam war for a good ten years, re-fighting the bad fight with honest convictions and a few old water chestnuts (i.e., there aren't any just wars, only those you win or lose). This novel is one you'll also lose unless you insist on determining whether Ron Clark, who had disappeared in Cambodia with two other CBS correspondents, is alive or dead. If he's dead, his bitch wife Andrea wants his considerable money--she was the last in a string of rotten relationships. Sent to find him is a representative of the Consortium of Swiss Banks who learns, as you will slowly, that Ron had initially been an ""active"" (CIA) before he had progressed from hopeful intervention to total disaffection while all around him there was only boredom, drugs, and that one impure cliche--the whore with a heart of. . . . The novel is unconscionably repetitious but it's done well in France where apparently they see no need to lean too hard on their still more successful product, the Bic pen.