THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 16, 1995 TAG: 9508160023
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROSS C. REEVES
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
ONE CAN ONLY guess how novels like ``The Takeover'' (Dutton, 389 pp., $19.95) overcome absurd plots, bad writing and cartoon-like characters to bloom throughout airplane cabins and under beach umbrellas. Certainly aggressive hype has a lot to do with it, and the publisher has really fired the oven for this turkey. Another reason appears to be the allure of ``inside looks'' at the lifestyles of the rich, the powerful and the venal.
In ``The Takeover,'' Stephen W. Frey has producted the voyeuristic granddaddy of them all. If what follows ``ruins'' the plot of ``The Takeover,'' it's at worst a minor crime - on a par, say, with ruining haggis.
The protagonist, one Andrew Falcon, leaves his position as wunderkind partner in a WASPy investment banking house to develop software he has been ginning up on the side. This contrivance becomes all the more remarkable when Falcon laments a couple of hundred pages later that he doesn't know beans about computers.
What Falcon also doesn't know is that his old employer is a member of - you guessed it - a super-secret society. This one is comprised of seven Harvard grads who are smart and powerful as all get out. But somehow they goofed up and let a Southern populist get elected president and start soaking the rich with confiscatory taxes.
``The Seven'' connive to save the upper classes, first by subverting Falcon's software venture and then by arranging to deny him employment with anyone on Wall Street. His plight forces him to take a job with the fourth largest bank in the United States (controlled, of course, by you-know-who), which maneuvers him into single-handedly completing the largest (and most boring) hostile takeover ever. It remains only for the dastardly Cantabs to spring the trap by revealing world-class environmental claims against the take-over target. These claims, which are being secretly litigated by - well, yes, one of The Seven - wipe out the bank, ruin the financial system, crash the stock market and destroy the president and all his wooly-headed buddies.
Rube Goldberg, meet Robert Ludlum.
Falcon, in the meantime, discovers super-secret documents that one of The Seven has brought along on a business trip to Toledo, Ohio, a plot device with a familiar echo: ``Well, Mr. Bond, since you're about to die, it won't do any harm to show you . . . ''
Before pulling the tablecloth from under the china, The Seven necessarily have to orchestrate a few murders. Their numbing penchant for overelaboration peaks at a Montana trout lake, where a scuba-equipped henchman ties a rope around the waders of the Federal Reserve chairman and pulls him to a watery grave.
It's only fair to add that the ridiculous plot of ``The Takeover'' is equaled by the author's bad writing. (``His face never revealed his feelings. Because you could lose a client that way.'') Falcon finds his secretary ``wordprocessing'' a letter while ``the firm's largest customer, two huge insurance companies,'' is/are cancelling all its/their order(s), costing him ``multimillions'' and sending the company ``funnelling down the toilet.''
Frey's prose is enlivened only by the rat-a-tat-tat of internal contradictions, statements, boneheaded references and astonishing mischaracterizations of a host of laws.
All this being said, there is nevertheless one good reason to shell out 20 bucks for ``The Takeover'': the acknowledgments give the names of his literary and film agents. Give them a call. You too can write a best seller, soon to be a major motion picture. MEMO: Ross C. Reeves is a corporate attorney in Norfolk. by CNB