<i> The</i> Red White and Blue by John Gregory Dunne (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 475 pp.)

“I do not think Leah seriously expected her motion to carry. It did, however, give her an opportunity to work on a defense, to see how it would play for the record but before a jury was chosen and sworn. The transcript does not indicate how effective her performance was. I can see now the point of the simple and expensive clothes. The white silk blouse and the Italian suede skirt drew attention to her, as did her diminutive size. She became a well-groomed, non-threatening presence, and when she bent and whispered into the ear of Mercury Baker, sinister in his prison denims with the white letter P stenciled on the back, her arm draped casually on his massive shoulder for support, she was somehow able to make him appear less threatening also.

Leah was always a believer in the value of effect. In later years, after we were divorced, she took to wearing a large square-cut diamond solitaire in court. She bought the ring herself, I suspect as an aggressive act, a reaction against the expectations of her radical sympathizers. She liked it, and she wanted it, and no one could ever tell her what she could and could not do. She claimed that women on a jury always noticed the ring. I do not know how true this was--I have never put much faith in the totemic rituals of courtroom psychology--but I do know she would always play with that ring when she talked directly to a jury, twisting it constantly around her finger as she laid out her scenario of the events in question. One more note about sartorial effect. If her client were a woman, Leah would arrange at least once during the trial for the defendant and herself to wea1914726756who in some subliminal way might perhaps wonder how the defendant could be as guilty as the state claimed if she and her attorney went shopping for matching I. Miller black pumps. I mention these things only to indicate that however often Leah was portrayed on radio and television and in the newspapers, most especially my father’s, as simply a courtroom harridan mouthing slogans

and cant, she was also not immune to the usual vanities and superstitions that instilled confidence into her fragile psyche, and might even have helped her clients.

Although harridan she could be.

And slogans and cant she did mouth.

‘Who is the real criminal?’ Leah said that morning in Department 34. ‘The man imprisoned? Or the society that imprisons him?’ “From “The Red

White and Blue.”

Asmall surge has taken place lately about the long, devoted marriage of two very different writers. Joan Didion is known for her fine-grained, penetrating stories of disquiet and quiet corruption among privileged Americans at home and abroad. John Gregory Dunne writes in knowing and lowdown detail about cops, crooks and courtrooms; it is genre fiction of a high standard.

Yet there has been a trickle or two of convergence. Didion’s last novel, “Democracy,” is a subtle and thoughtful book that relates American narcissism to the damage it does around the world. It is thoroughly Didionish in subject matter, in its ability to convey the stale moral air in her world of well-heeled influence, and in its narrative style. This is allusive, nervy and faintly disjointed, suggesting both the lassitude of her narrators and the urgency of what they have to tell.

Protruding from the wan and dangerous characters in “Democracy” is a free-booting former Army officer. He is a mercenary, a loner and a man of prowess. He is not a tough-guy hero, exactly, because he is not a hero; but he does perk things up. There is something of a Dunneish quality to him.

In Dunne’s “The Red White and Blue,” convergence is no trickle but a flood. His protagonist is familiarly his: tough but wounded, knowledgeable but adrift, addicted to shading but needing a black-and-white setting to do it in, and attractive to women. But he has been turned loose in a doomed Didion world, where national politics and drugged morals mesh with Hollywood, big money, manipulation and radical chic.

Jack Broderick is not simply turned loose in this world; he narrates it. Apparently passive, he controls it by knowing everything and coloring it with his abrasive and world-weary judgments.

Jack is the second son of a new dynasty. His father, Hugh, is a self-made tycoon who in many respects suggests the late Joseph Kennedy. Irish-Catholic, a ruthless fighter, he is a billionaire, more or less, and wields enormous political and economic influence. In the pile-on style that marks and often overfeeds the book, Dunne has him refusing the offers of four different presidents to be secretary of the Treasury, while advising De Gaulle about the franc, and Mayor Daley of Chicago on politics.

He is cold to his children and immensely ambitious for them, and they all disappoint him. None becomes President, although a daughter is the President’s mistress. His oldest son, Bro, does achieve prominence, but as a priest; a fashionably radical priest who jets from inner-city ghettos and farm-worker camps to the White House and the Vatican. He is a spiritual middleman, challenging the powerful by making full use of his connections with them. And enjoying it all. And perhaps--the narrator, like the other characters, is always having it all ways--suffering.

Jack, with several trust funds, is a successful San Francisco journalist who becomes a successful screenwriter. Two jobs that combine a lack of engagement, a certain challenge, a fair prestige and lots of access. And from this well-feathered access, Jack tells his story.

The story is not the main point. It is more detailed than complex and depends on some strained coincidence. Bro is assassinated at the end by an embittered right-wing veteran Jack had known in Vietnam, and whose stories and inventions Jack used in a successful book called “Grunts.”

We learn this at the beginning, in fact. The narrative skips back and forth, shifts, and leaves prominent holes that are later filled, often inconspicuously. The effect is not so much to create suspense as to give intensity to the narration; to suggest that here is a story so terrible as to defy an orderly telling.

Essentially, Jack is relating an acrid panorama of the times, the unsettled years of hope, fakery and disillusion running from the ‘60s through the early ‘70s. The characters are all symptoms. There is Leah, a tough, radical lawyer who is Jack’s first wife and who sleeps at one point with Hugh, and who ends up assassinated along with Bro. She, and possibly Bro, are the book’s closest approximation to heroes.

The rest are cynical, depraved or victimized.

They include a murderous black convict who becomes a hero of the left and ends up rich; various dismal Hollywood figures who hedge radical chic with tax shelters; a President who is ostensibly liberal, entirely opportunistic and a womanizer, besides; a Latino farm-worker organizer who ends up dead, and an assortment of right-wing fat cats. Many of them are meant to be identified.

Dunne’s writing is witty and awesomely accurate in its detail. It has an alluring and impeccable surface. His trendy actress, who goes to Hanoi, gets herself photographed wearing the crash helmet of a downed American pilot (she might as well wear a necklace made of his teeth) and later moves, out of activism and into multiple-picture deals, could not be bettered.

Of the two major characters, Leah is the best. She is perpetually in combat, unscrupulous in her means and incorruptible in her ends. She makes concessions--a weakness for fine clothes and expensive perfumes--but never sells out. Bro, on the other hand, though adorned with all kinds of shrewd detail, never quite transcends the cliches he represents. Graham Greene might have made a saint out of him and his worldliness; Dunne makes him faintly overripe.

Perhaps the book’s major defect lies in the narrator and his narration. They are overpowering. Jack is overendowed. His money and connections take him everywhere. He’s first-rate at everything he does. He has casual flings with duchesses. Everyone he knows is the most of something--richest, most famous, most violent, most stylishly decrepit and so forth.

This, hugely magnified, is in the tradition of the hard-boiled genre, whose narrator-protagonist, even if broken-down or knocked about, has a fundamental invulnerability, lots of savvy and marvelous taste, if not judgment. He knows the right brand of whiskey, authentic jazz, authentic women. It’s reassuring on a small scale. On the large scale of this book, it threatens disbelief or claustrophobia.

More damaging is another genre trait: narrative omnipotence. Jack’s tone is compounded by cynicism, cleverness, anger, an ability to see through everything and everyone, and that old deep-down vulnerability.

It is a marvelous instrument; Dunne has fashioned it with skill and even subtlety. But it makes every tune sound the same. Despite the variety of characters, each comes to seem, with the partial exception of Leah, one more twinge of Jack’s old complaint.

For all its skill and detail, “Red White and Blue” is essentially inert. Dunne does not manage to do what he seems most to want to do: give us a new insight into public ills by means of private symptoms. Dunne’s public world is recognizable enough but only because we have read about it in the newspapers and seen it on television. His characters illustrate it, they do not construct it.