BURDEN OF DESIRE; by Robert MacNeil; Doubleday; 466 pages; $22.50.
Television journalist Robert MacNeil has taken a bloody fact from history and used it as the core around which to build a remarkable first novel, "Burden of Desire."The fact: On Dec. 6, 1917, a munitions ship loaded with thousands of tons of explosives destined for the World War I battlefields of Europe collided with another ship in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The resulting immense blast leveled 2 square miles of the city, killed more than 1,600 people and injured more than 1,000 others.
Two men, childhood friends, quickly move to help the blast victims. They are clergyman Peter Wentworth and psychologist Stewart McPherson. While collecting clothing for the wounded, Wentworth finds a diary in his carriage that has fallen from the pocket of a donated coat. It bears no identifying mark, so Wentworth is unable to return it. The reader, however, is fully aware that the diary entries were made by a rather well-to-do young woman.
Wentworth reads the diary and is at first shocked by the sexual longings revealed in the volume's entries. Then he feels he must find the diarist, as does McPherson, to whom he gave the book to read.
As novelist MacNeil propels their search along, he has much to say about how things were in society then and how little society changes as the years advance.SHORT LIST; by Jim Lehrer; Putnam; 224 pages; $19.95.
The One-Eyed Mack, comic hero now of five Jim Lehrer novels, gives a succinct summation of the plot of "Short List" in the book's first paragraph:
"I'd like to tell you about the time I was on the Short List - the Short List to be the Democratic nominee for vice president of the United States. It was an unusual event because I was both the first one-eyed American and the first Oklahoman of any kind ever to come really close to being nominated for national office."
When Oklahoma Gov. Buffalo Joe Hayman, originally scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City, has a mild stroke, Mack is called on to do the job for the incapacitated governor. Mack, Oklahoma's lieutenant governor, does a bang-up job of delivering Buffalo Joe's speech, especially when he puts in stuff of his own, such as pleading with the nationwide television audience to find a mummy, believed that of John Wilkes Booth, which is missing from an Oklahoma museum.
Mack is such a hit that the candidate for president puts him on a list of possible candidates for his vice president. That, of course, sets things flying, as probes are made into Mack's past that unearth such things as a prostitute's claim that she and Mack had sex on a bus years earlier, and a convict's claim that Mack got to be lieutenant governor in order to parole the convict from prison.
The wild claims give Lehrer, a noted television newsman, a chance to excoriate the excesses of sensational journalism, and he does so with gusto.