Book World: Patrick Anderson reviews Nicolle Wallace’s ‘It’s Classified’

If you enjoy seeing Palin mugged, all this is diverting enough, but if you’re looking for a coherent character, it’s puzzling. Tara feels like an awkward stitching together of Wallace’s personal scorn for Palin, with her novelistic need to grant Sarah/Tara a few positive traits. We might ask, too, if Palin is worth all this attention. There have been memorable romans a clef about American politicians — such as Robert Penn Warren’s invocation of Huey Long in “All the King’s Men” and Billy Lee Brammer’s take on Lyndon Johnson in “The Gay Place” — but those were leaders of consequence. With the increasingly irrelevant Palin, it’s more like kicking a dead horse.

Yet the novel has many virtues. It moves along smartly and suspensefully, with insightful glimpses of White House life. There are delicious asides, like a moment on television when “David Gergen was droning on about the history of special counsels and Wolf Blitzer was trying to look riveted.” The book is at its best near its end, when the president and her aides struggle with an investigation they consider entirely partisan — and that may have been suggested by Wallace’s painful memories of the prosecution of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

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The special prosecutor’s probe tears the Kramer administration apart. Washington-wise Melanie warns a colleague, “This place is about to become a snake pit,” and it does, as friends fall out, lawyers are hired and the backstabbing begins. Wallace often seems to be sharing hard-won truths, as when the president reflects, “Idealistic aides were the most loyal and hardworking, but they had a tendency to turn on you with a vengeance when they became disillusioned.”

Wallace gives her story an inspired ending when one character emerges from the bloodletting as a master of duplicity — a cunning and dangerous new White House power broker. It’s a gloriously cynical climax to an entertaining tale, and by itself could justify another book about Charlotte Kramer’s troubled White House. Wallace’s first two novels have been impressive, but if she has finally exorcised Tara/Sarah’s demonic spirit, she might go on to write an even better one.

Anderson reviews mysteries regularly for The Post.

IT’S CLASSIFIED

By Nicolle Wallace

Atria. 325 pp. $25