If Men Were Angels

An absorbing political drama about a golden boy presidential candidate and the sympathetic reporter who brings him down, Karaim's debut is certainly timely, and the issues it raises are provocative. The moral lapse--the ""sin""--of liberal Illinois congressman Thomas Crane is something that 33-year-old Montana-born reporter Cliff O'Connell discovers reluctantly, though breaking the story will gain him entr e to the privileged Ivy League world of newspaper journalism. Working in Washington, D.C., for a newspaper syndicate based in San Diego, O'Connell is assigned to cover Crane's campaign; his main worry is that his ex-lover, Robin Winter, is on the staff of the Crane camp. But as the campaign catches fire and O'Connell begins to respect Crane, he uncovers parts of the candidate's past overlooked by other reporters, finally unearthing the potential bombshell. Agonizing over whether to run the story, Cliff makes a personal rather than a professional decision because of something Robin says--and then he must live with the consequences. Karaim, who covered the 1992 Democratic campaign for Knight-Ridder, invests the novel with the authoritative details of nonfiction: observations about the nature of journalism, an insider's view of a political organization in the throes of a presidential race; the behavior of the American public when faced with scandal and celebrity. Karaim's attention to the development of O'Connell's character as he faces a serious moral dilemma elevates the novel from legal thriller to psychological drama. As O'Connell feels the pressure of ""desperate bargains struck with ourselves and others,"" the sword of Damocles that's been hanging over this novel finally falls. Indeed, the foreshadowing here is heavy--the narrative conceit is that the reader knows the Thomas Crane story, but not the untold tale of the reporter's struggle--but the writing itself brings to the novel's melancholy intelligence a kind of worldly, journalistic know-how that rescues the novel from an excess of angst. (May)