An earlier version of this review incorrectly suggested that Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) is a character in the book. He is not. This version has been updated.
Book World: Thomas Mallon’s ‘Watergate’ is imaginative political farce
The novel expands creatively on Longworth’s friendship with Nixon and imagines him as her “kindred spirit,” the two of them sharing some of the story’s most poignant moments. Scores of people were eventually convicted, but “the little cloak and dagger foolishness of Watergate” doesn’t impress Longworth much; she remembers real crises, when “legless Civil War veterans [were] begging in the streets.” That long-range historical perspective combined with her acidic wit conveys the novel’s implicit argument that there’s something absurd about a country as freighted with responsibilities and challenges as ours tearing itself apart over this cheap crime.
But despite the investigative evidence available, Mallon’s reconstruction of events defuses blame — not to excuse anyone in particular but to convey the mad chaos that sweeps up all the president’s men. No matter how Machiavellian Haldeman pretends to be, there is no master plot, no puppeteer, no grand scheme behind all these shenanigans. In the constantly shifting perspectives of “Watergate,” we can see that no one knows where the idea for the break-in came from — Liddy? Jeb Magruder? One of Hunt’s spy thrillers? The coverup isn’t a conspiracy so much as a farce of misdirection and self-delusion, as everyone jockeys in the dark for advancement or plea bargains or book deals or positions in the next administration.
But beware: This novel is strictly BYOW (Bring Your Own Wikipedia). Unless you actually participated in the break-in, “Watergate” will challenge your memory of those internecine months before the president resigned. The author of seven previous novels, Mallon has never before taken on a subject so voluminously over-documented, and he expects his readers to have bloodied their fingertips in the archives. He has no more use for exposition than Haldeman had for alcohol (and if you don’t get that joke, consider yourself warned). Political references and allusions fall from these pages as thickly as confetti at the Republican convention; catch them if you can. Even by Washington standards, this is the name-droppiest novel I’ve ever read — like having lunch at Charlie Palmer’s with the most ambitious congressional aide in the District. The advent of e-readers will make it easy for Washington’s elder elite to search for themselves in these chapters, and Mallon may find himself on several new Enemies Lists. (He certainly won’t be getting Christmas cards from Patrick Buchanan or the senior George Bush.)
His decision to focus so intensely on the interior story of the Watergate participants saves Mallon the trouble of retelling the history that’s been told (and lied about) before. But it also produces a novel that’s daringly undramatic. Essentially everything here happens off-stage, from the break-in all the way to — spoiler alert! — the pardon. There’s no drama from the Senate hearings, no journalistic derring-do. The book remains compelling only because Mallon writes with such wit and psychological acuity as he spins this carousel of characters caught in a scandal that’s constantly fracturing into new crises.
Indeed, despite the country-shaking events constantly breaking in the background, this remains a novel of conversation and introspection, the dark fears of the famous and the humble. Mallon captures all the strange people who “made the Watergate a whole damned world unto itself,” but he also makes that world seem very small. It’s a dramatic reminder that, as Tip O’Neill was fond of saying, all politics is local.
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