Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Mallon, T. 2012 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From one of our most esteemed historical novelists, a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators.
For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated--uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs--it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal's greatest mysteries (who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?) and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety.
In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now, moving readers from the private cabins of Camp David to the klieg lights of the Senate Caucus Room, from the District of Columbia jail to the Dupont Circle mansion of Theodore Roosevelt's sharp-tongued ninety-year-old daughter ("The clock is dick-dick-dicking"), and into the hive of the Watergate complex itself, home not only to the Democratic National Committee but also to the president's attorney general, his recklessly loyal secretary, and the shadowy man from Mississippi who pays out hush money to the burglars.
Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his "splendid evocation of Washington," Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy that surpasses even what he attained in his previous novels, as he turns a "third-rate burglary" into a tumultuous, first-rate entertainment.
Author Notes
Thomas Mallon, author of "In Fact", is a frequent contributor to many magazines & journals. His column, "Doubting Thomas" ran for six years in GQ. His novels Dewey Defeats Truman & Henry & Clara were New York Times Notable Books. A recipient of Guggenheim & Rockefeller fellowships, he lives in Westport, Connecticut.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mallon's historical novels have been moving steadily closer to the present, from the Lincoln era through the Gilded and Jazz ages to the 1940s and, with Fellow Travelers, his last book, the McCarthy era. Here he takes on the '70s, which, depending on the reader, will seem either ancient or way too recent to be history. As Mallon moves from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices to Nixon's resignation, shifting viewpoints as he goes, he provides a lot of exposition. Some of it, implausibly, occurs in dialogue and internal monologues, as people go over what they know for the sake of readers who no longer do or never did. It's hard going at first, but the reward is getting to enter the heads of Watergate participants who were off to the side or never wrote memoirs: Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods, progenitor of the famed 18-minute tape gap; stoic Pat Nixon; meddling Alice Roosevelt Longworth, famously tart-tongued and responsible here for some very funny moments; and Mississippian Fred LaRue, aka the "Bagman." Mallon makes these people sympathetic, no small feat; readers may be surprised at how much they end up disliking Elliot Richardson, one of the era's few heroes. If the author can't bring the story to a satisfying close or explain why so many were so loyal to the president they call "the Old Man," well, history is often messier than fiction. Agent: The Wylie Agency (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Mallon (Fellow Travelers, 2007), astute and nimble, continues his scintillating, morally inquisitive journey through crises great and absurd in American politics by taking on Watergate. Mixing judiciously selected facts about the infamous break-in and cover-up with shrewd invention, Mallon creates a whirling behind-the-scenes drama with a selective and intriguing cast: Nixon, a misanthrope in a flesh-presser's profession, able to succeed from cunning and a talent for denying reality at close range. Howard Hunt, a mediocre fiction writer turned ill-fated White House plumber. Ambitious cabinet member Elliot Richardson, and melancholy and enigmatic bagman Fred LaRue. Always sensitive to the marginalized, Mallon tells the stories of the Watergate women with particular insight and panache, beginning with Pat Nixon, a clandestine smoker with a secret love and far more wit and moxie than her public persona suggests. Nixon's devoted and flinty secretary, Rose Mary Woods, loves to dance and conceals a molten temper. The venomously funny belle of this satirical ball is Alice Longworth Roosevelt, who, in her mischievous nineties, knows everyone and will say anything. Mallon himself is deliciously witty. But it is his political fluency and unstinting empathy that transform the Watergate debacle into a universal tragicomedy of ludicrous errors and malignant crimes, epic hubris and sorrow. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With Washington politics in an uproar, Mallon's knowing and entertaining take on Watergate will garner avid media attention as he makes appearances accompanied by a high-profile ad campaign.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I'M fairly sure it's a faux pas to compare a novel and a television show, but I mean it as a compliment to both when I say that Thomas Mallon's new novel, "Watergate," bears a certain resemblance to "The West Wing." Like that much-loved NBC drama, "Watergate" shifts among various men and women - mostly men - working inside and outside the White House. Even when the action becomes convoluted, we're propelled forward and kept highly entertained by the colorful characters, the delicious insider details, the intelligence of the dialogue. Where "The West Wing" and "Watergate" diverge, at least most obviously, is that one is about a fictitious, idealized Democratic president and his staff while the other features fictional depictions of real, corrupt Republicans. This difference is less pronounced than you might imagine, however, largely because of Mallon's evenhandedness. He's not out to lampoon Richard Nixon or anyone else. Nor is he out to redeem the Nixon administration, which would have been just as tedious. In fact, Mallon avoids rendering Watergate in the familiar and expected ways: there are only fleeting references to Woodward and Bernstein, and the eventual profusion of indictments and imprisonments aren't major plot points. What Mallon captures particularly well is the fundamental weirdness and mystery at the center of the scandal. Who was trying to achieve what with those break-ins? And why? Given how ineptly they were carried out, could the sloppiness have been intentional - either as a result of double agentry or as individual self-sabotage? In these pages, even those closest to the events remain bewildered by their smallness - their ridiculousness, even - and their contrastingly outsize and ruinous consequences. It appears that Mallon's primary goal, one he achieves with great finesse, is to make the portrayals of his characters as believable as possible. Like the rest of us, they aren't simply moral or immoral but are both clever and defensive, selfish and self-pitying, sweet and loyal, generous and venal. Also, there are quite a lot of them. Mallon's initial list of "The Players" in this book contains 112 names, perhaps an unnecessary resource for readers who lived through Watergate, but extremely valuable for those, like me, who did not. Yet Mallon's control over his material, his ability to subtly cue the reader about what information warrants close attention, means that "Watergate" isn't usually confusing, even to a younger reader and even though name-bestrewn passages like this one, which describes the night of Nixon's landslide 1972 re-election, are common: "Nixon sorted through congratulatory messages and returned phone calls from Rockefeller and Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia's tough-cop mayor, who made Agnew look like Elliot Richardson, according to Ehrlichman. When Haldeman reminded them of this line, Nixon asked, 'Was Richardson on the platform at the hotel?'" With such a large cast, it's no surprise that the characters who show up the most often emerge the most vividly: Fred LaRue, a gentle White House aide from Mississippi, haunted by a not-so-gentle secret, who deliberately flies below the radar of the public; Rose Mary Woods, the president's tough and steadfast secretary (and yes, the eraser of those tapes - though not for the reason everyone thinks); Elliot Richardson, who serves as secretary of health, education and welfare, then of defense and finally as Nixon's attorney general, hiding his own presidential ambitions behind a screen of self-righteousness. (Hoping to be tapped as Gerald Ford's vice president after Nixon's resignation, Richardson makes an amusingly blunt list "of his rivals' liabilities": Gov. Nelson Rockefeller is "too old, pushy," while Senator Edward Brooke is "too liberal, black.") Also included in the mix is Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, widow of the former House speaker Nicholas Longworth and famed deliverer of bons mots. At 90, Mrs. L. remains "a creature of motiveless mischief" who steals every scene she's in. She demands that the White House schedule Christmas parties around her own calendar, performs bucktoothed impersonations of her cousin Eleanor, rides the dumbwaiter in her house (or claims to) because there's no elevator and stays up all night reading, then uses the bone from a veal chop as a bookmark. As for the Nixons, sad and stoic Pat is also keeping a secret, one that makes her seem highly sympathetic. And Mallon abandons the usual sweaty, paranoid caricature of Nixon, offering instead a nuanced man who can even be endearing - quite a feat for those of us in the generation for which a Nixon Halloween mask is as much a reference point as Nixon himself. Mallon's Nixon is preoccupied less with his enemies than with his foreign policy. An oddly touching moment in October 1972 has Rose Mary Woods glancing at a folder marked Oslo, "containing a plan of action to be implemented should the president win the Nobel Peace Prize. If he secured the Vietnam deal on top of China and Russia, how, Rose wondered, could he not get it?" (Ironically, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state, would win it the following year.) A "misanthrope in a flesh-presser's profession," this Nixon is awkward rather than evil. He's chivalrous with elderly Mrs. Longworth, forgiving of subordinates' mistakes and entirely human in poignant ways: fastidious about having the White House barber "cup a little tuft of chest hair emerging above his collar," irritated by the fact that the edited transcripts of the White House tapes make him sound as if he drops hard-core obscenities rather than mild ones. AND yet it's the very fact that Mallon portrays Nixon and others so convincingly that raises questions about the fairness of depicting real people in a work of fiction. Is this type of literary borrowing less trasgressive when it makes readers like the subjects better? When the subjects are dead? If so, for how long? Ten years? A hundred? Obviously, there's no consensus when it comes to any of this, but I do know that if you write a novel about, say, Catherine the Great, you probably won't be scolded for misrepresenting her or otherwise infringing on her privacy, while if you write a novel inspired by Laura Bush, as I did in 2008, you most definitely will. In my case, I changed names, which Mallon has chosen not to do. And I made peace with the intrusive nature of what I was doing by telling myself that to sincerely imagine what the world looks like from someone else's perspective is an act of compassion. The counterargument, of course, is that even the most savagely mocking skit on "Saturday Night Live" is less insidious than the sustained realism of a novel. "The reason it's such a violation," a journalist told me about my own book, "is that every single thing in it is plausible." Judged by the same standard, Thomas Mallon is - appropriately enough, for a book about Watergate - equally guilty. Curtis Sittenfeld's fourth novel, "Earthquake Season," will be published next year. A 'misanthrope in a flesh-pressers profession,' Mallon's Nixon is awkward rather than evil.
Library Journal Review
If ever a historical event was worthy of a comic novel, it's Watergate, and Mallon, with several outstanding historical novels to his credit (most recently, Fellow Travelers), has the skills to write it. What a cast of characters we meet! Ex-spy G. Gordon Liddy is nearly certifiable; his colleague H. Howard Hunt's hold on reality seems equally tenuous at times. Around them floats a cast of clowns and self-serving creeps who make the familiar story a veritable opera buffa. At the top, clinging desperately to his fading political success, is Nixon, a complicated man who can't understand why people don't trust him. Events unfold through the perspectives of six characters: Republican Party fixer Fred LaRue; ex-spook Hunt; 90-year-old society madam Alice Roosevelt Longworth; Nixon's doggedly loyal secretary, Rose Woods; Nixon himself; and his wife, Pat, who comes across as far from the plastic Barbie Doll she's usually portrayed to be. There are no surprise revelations here, but Mallon writes with such swagger that it all seems new again. VERDICT A sure winner, for its subject and Mallon's proven track record as a historical novelist, and because it's good. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/11.]-David Keymer, Modesto CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.