RADICAL SURGERY

Satirist and magazine writer Markfield, whose You Could Live If They Let You (1974) put a Jewish president and a lot of one- liners into the White House, puts a syntax thrasher in the same spot and an absurdist in the Kremlin. Situation outweighs plot in this densely written, relentlessly sardonic sendup of presidents and geopolitics. The situation is the ascension to Soviet power of Pavel Gavrych, whose pure and burning teenage devotion to Marxism/Leninism as practiced in the Workers' Paradise came face to face with the cruelty of Uncle Joe Stalin in a personal meeting in which the generalissimo dislocated the lad's thumbs to show him the way of the world. Forty years later Gavrych turns Soviet communism on its ear by unleashing the most bizarre inherent forces of central planning and authority. The upshot is a totally confused state no longer inimical to the West—as a result of which America's gabbling, dreamy President panics, seeing no role for himself in a