I'm fairly sure it's the faux pas to compare the novel as well as the television show, yet we meant it as the enrich to both when we say which Thomas Mallon's new novel, "Watergate," bears the sure similarity to "The West Wing." Like which much-loved NBC drama, "Watergate" shifts between assorted group as well as women often group working inside as well as outside the White House. Even when the action becomes convoluted, we're propelled brazen as well as kept rarely entertained by the full of color characters, the delicious insider details, the intelligence of the dialogue.
Illustration by Jesse Lenz
WATERGATE
By Thomas Mallon
432 pp. Pantheon Books. $ 26.95.
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Times Topic: Richard Milhous Nixon
Where "The West Wing" as well as "Watergate" diverge, during slightest many obviously, is which the single is about the fictitious, idealized Democratic boss as well as his staff while the other features fictional depictions of real, hurtful Republicans. This difference is reduction pronounced than you might imagine, however, mostly because of Mallon's evenhandedness. He's not out to lampoon Richard Nixon or any the single else. Nor is he out to set free the Nixon administration, which would have been customarily as tedious. In fact, Mallon avoids digest Watergate in the informed as well as approaching ways: there have been customarily passing references to Woodward as well as Bernstein, as well as the contingent profusion of indictments as well as imprisonments aren't major tract points.
What Mallon captures utterly well is the elem! ental we irdness as well as mystery during the center of the scandal. Who was perplexing to grasp what with those break-ins? And why? Given how ineptly they were carried out, could the sloppiness have been intentional possibly as the outcome 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 as well as their contrastingly outsize as well as ruinous consequences.
It appears which Mallon's primary goal, the single he achieves with great finesse, is to have the portrayals of his characters as believable as possible. Like the rest of us, they aren't simply moral or immoral yet have been both crafty as well as defensive, greedy as well as self-pitying, sweet as well as loyal, generous as well as venal. Also, there have been utterly the lot of them.
Mallon's primary list of "The Players" in this book contains 112 names, perhaps an nonessential apparatus for readers who lived through Watergate, yet extremely valuable for those, similar to me, who did not. Yet Mallon's carry out over his material, his capability to subtly cue the reader about what report warrants close attention, equates to which "Watergate" isn't customarily confusing, even to the younger reader as well as even yet name-bestrewn passages similar to this one, which describes the night of Nixon's landslide 1972 re-election, have been common:
"Nixon sorted through congratulatory messages as well as returned phone calls from Rockefeller as well as Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia's tough-cop mayor, who done Agnew demeanour similar to Elliot Richardson, according to Ehrlichman. When Haldeman reminded them of this line, Nixon asked, 'Was Richardson upon the height during the hotel?' "
With such the large cast, it's no warn which the characters who uncover up the many often emerge the many vividly: Fred LaRue, the peaceful White House help from Mississippi, haunted by the not-so-gentle secret, who on purpose flies below the ra! dar of t he public; Rose Mary Woods, the president's tough as well as indifferent cabinet member (and yes, the eraser of those tapes yet not for the reason everybody thinks); Elliot Richardson, who serves as cabinet member of health, preparation as well as welfare, then of invulnerability as well as finally as Nixon's attorney general, stealing his own presidential ambitions behind the shade of self-righteousness. (Hoping to be tapped as Gerald Ford's clamp boss after Nixon's resignation, Richardson creates an amusingly brief list "of his rivals' liabilities": Gov. Nelson Rockefeller is "too old, pushy," while Senator Edward Brooke is "too liberal, black.")
Curtis Sittenfeld's fourth novel, "Earthquake Season," will be published next year.
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