THE PASSION OF RICHARD THYNNE

The author of the somehow-successful Red Carpet for the Shah recreates ""the glory and tragedy"" of a gay scientific wunderkind who's ultimately savaged and mutilated by his spaced-out bisexual lover. Richard Thynne is a sixteen-year-old Stuyvesant High math whiz when he's discovered by a paternalistic Harvard professor and whisked away to Cambridge. A Nobel laureate at twenty, the ""latter-day Pythagorean"" remains a pathetic prodigy even after his ""intensely, often suffocatingly, physical"" relationship with sculptor Jim Upham. It so happens that the freaky artiste is a fringe member of ""Apache,"" a radical organization whose ""sole aim is the destruction of the white man's symbols"" (i.e., museums, churches, and the Baseball Hall of Fame). When Thynne later objects to the torching of Harvard's Widener Library, he rats to the feds and winds up a corpse. This is as ludicrous as it sounds and about as appetizing as used flypaper.