Landfall

OUR CURRENT presidency is more like fiction than ever seemed possible - a postmodern black comedy with a crazed protagonist hellbent on blurring all lines between fantasy and reality. Which is just one of the things that make reading and judging a work of fiction about the last Republican president, George W. Bush, somewhat complicated. "Landfall" is Thomas Mallon's 10th novel. Most of the others are also set in Washington around Republican presidents, all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. Yet even though the presidency in this book ended only a decade ago, its past is a foreign country nonetheless. A government run by establishment Republicans, many of them decent and idealistic? How quaint. The author is an establishment Republican. He ghostwrote Dan Quayle's memoir and served as deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Bush. (Disclosure: The N.E.H. has provided funding to the public radio show I host.) In a 2016 article he called his party's imminent convention "a political Jonestown." Of course, the cyanide in Donald Trump's Kool-Aid turned out to be a slow-acting kind, and in fact he's done Mállón a favor, making this an optimal moment to publish a sympathetic novel concerning a bad-but-not-that-bad Republican president. Previous fiction about Washington politics mostly avoided using real names of the living people they fictionalized, from Henry Adams's "Democracy" through Allen Drury's "Advise and Consent." Even in Philip Roth's satirical fantasy "Our Gang," Nixon and the other characters had fictional names, as did the Clintons et al. in Joe Klein's "Primary Colors." But by 2008 it seemed almost quaint when Curtis Sittenfeld altered Laura and George Bush's names and backgrounds in her excellent novel "American Wife." Oliver Stone's biopic "W." and Will Ferrell's Bush play, "You're Welcome America," appeared around that time, and since then naming names has become the Washington-fiction norm, as in movies like "Vice." So, no surprise, Mallon's three most recent novels - "Watergate"; "Finale," about Reagan; and now "Landfall" - are jam-packed with "real" people, a hundred apiece. That extreme celebritude aside, however, Mallon writes old-school Washington fiction in the Ward Just tradition, neither Gore Vidalian cynicism nor, despite its funny moments - at a Christopher Hitchens party, "John Edwards and Donatella Versace silently marveled at each other's appearance" - Chris Buckleyesque comedy. As teenagers in 1978, the two main characters, Ross and Allison, meet at a W.-for-Congress campaign event in Lubbock - at which Ross encounters Bush too, and "vaguely realized that... he was a little in love with both of them." Ross and Allie date a bit but that's that. Ross goes from Lubbock to Harvard for a Ph.D., becomes a professor, whereafter "being a registered Republican academic made him enough of a rara avis" to get hired as a federal humanities bureaucrat in Washington (in other words, much like Mallon). Which enables Ross and Allie to remeet cute after 27 years apart, just when Ross's marriage to "his Bush-hating wife" is unraveling. Allie, a civilian lawyer for the Army, D.C.-based but dispatched frequently to Afghanistan and Iraq, never married. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld takes a shine to her uppity skepticism of the Iraq war. He assigns her to the National Security Council staff, hoping she'll be a more forceful "office wife" to the president than Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state. Bush takes even more of a shine to Allie. "Landfall" is a romance - a romance in which the president repeatedly intercedes, rom-com fashion - set against the machinations concerning the administration's defining failure in Iraq. There's also quite a bit about its other defining failure, Hurricane Katrina, and a good, MacGuffinish Bush family subplot that Ross uncovers. Mallon's portrayals of most of his wellknown main characters are flattering. But he's also entertainingly bitchy. He nails John Kerry at Bush's second inaugural - "the disappointed, more-in-sorrow-thanin-anger look... that pained expression of his, sort of a sigh that always meant to say it's more complicated than that." Barbara Bush is consistently mean, and not just about Jeb, the "son she admired more and loved less." Laura never liked Karl Rove, and calls John Irving "a modern, mediocre Dickens." Nancy Reagan muses that Princess Diana was dumb, John Travolta gay; since she's old enough that her "daughter has had her first face lift" she should relax about life. Elizabeth Dole's cosmetic surgery is "shockingly bad," and her fellowformer-senator husband Bob "truly couldn't stand" the elder George Bush and disliked his son "even more." Mallon turns a few real people into piñatas he hits repeatedly, and not just famous ones like Edwards and Henry Kissinger. The longtime Bush lieutenant Karen Hughes asks Condi Rice to pull strings to get her son into Stanford. (Rice was actually Stanford's provost, and Hughes's son, named in the novel, actually went there.) The Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson gets multiple whacks, including a joke about his real-life heart attack. I anticipated fun when a certain White House staff secretary appears early on, complete with a presidential nickname, "?-Man" - but, unlike a Chekhovian first-act pistol, Brett Kavanaugh never speaks or returns. Rice is the most compelling character. Allie pities "poor Condi, who seemed to have spent a lifetime offering graciousness as a kind of microwaved substitute for actual warmth." Barbara Bush reckons Rice "wanted her real personality to break through; she was merely afraid of it - as opposed to Hillary ... who despised her own real self." But Rice has an authentic center, knows that if she ran for office "every compromise and stifling and self-suppression to be performed would... devour her with shame." At an Army base in Germany, preparing to address the troops outdoors, she unbuttons her coat so it will blow open and "reveal a pair of knee-high boots tightly encasing two legs whose several inches of exposed thigh had been made shapely by uncountable hours on the elliptical. ... Our Miss Brooks morphing into Lucy Lawless. ... Dominatrix? Who, me ?" Three hundred pages later, she's in bed with the named, real Canadian foreign minister, a man 11 years her junior. "Condi admired the forearm flexors of Canada's Sexiest Male M.P.," and later proudly thinks "I got laid," but also recognizes that their "lovemaking resembled the U.S.-Canadian relationship. .. affectionate; not especially dramatic; and unlikely to evolve." As for Bush, I'm willing to buy that he really is kind, particularly to the women in his life; emotional about the wounded and displaced; "sickened" by corruption "more than any dovishness"; and realized after being re-elected "how much he already wanted the whole thing to be over." And he might have the dark, funny thought that "if the plane aiming for the Capitol dome on September 11 had actually hit it, he could imagine his vice president muttering 'No loss' through that sly slit of a mouth." But the W. of "Landfall" is unbelievably wonderful. He makes charming fun of his reputation for ignorance - and then disproves it again and again. He's fluent geopolitically, historically, philosophically. He knows minutiae, like the Iraqi village where Saddam's regime executed over 140 people in 1982, and he's smart about the bigger picture, understanding that his war to incite regional democratization "was, he'd come to realize, his own domino theory, a reversal of the L.B. J. version." When Rumsfeld and Rice have a spat, he angrily asks: "What would you call that? A 'dialectic'?" His born-again Christianity, he figures, gives him "more in common with, and more insight into, the most radical Muslim who read his Quran than the unbeliever who never opened his Bible." And Mallon's Bush is this much of a brainiac mensch: He's trying to finagle a happy ending for Allie and Ross because he'd failed in Iraq and New Orleans, and thus "felt required to amalgamate... the miniature and the giant. If he could help to solve their problems, writ small in the ink of a double catastrophe, maybe that could lead him toward a solution for the catastrophes themselves." His flaws are barely flaws. Dole rags on him for "always choking up" and Kissinger, likewise, for possibly being "the sincerest man I've ever met." In this book his biggest problem, which Mallon diagnoses well, is a fundamental uneasiness, the lack of an even keel. Young Laura worries "how long it would be before the quick, constant movements between overindulgence and athletic self-punishment broke the spring of her husband's metronome." When Allie first beholds him, she remarks on the fake good humor - "He's actually pissed off. I can see it in his eyes" - and three decades later still sees the bipolarity: "Half the time he was without self-confidence; the other half he spilled an excess of it." But this is such a mature and selfaware Bush that he knows he "had to fight it, the sudden shift from merriment to irritability, from runner's high to cramp, the flight and crash he experienced a dozen times an hour." He wonders at one point if he is "getting as paranoid as Nixon," and then decides that maybe President Ford "was the only normal guy to have occupied the place," including himself and his father. I was surprised how little space such a thoughtful writer devotes in this long novel to the awful particulars of its central catastrophe. He's too easy on everyone. The action starts nearly two years into the war, well after the administration made its big, terrible decisions. The profound bungling and cynicism and deception behind those decisions is elided, practically ignored, eclipsed by Bush's present-moment sincerity and idealism. Dick Cheney is generally absent, as are any real discussions of waterboarding or renditions or Guantanamo. Rice's predecessor, Colin Powell, who warned the president in 2002 that if we broke Iraq we'd own it, is recalled as a self-righteous ass. The war years Mallon has chosen to focus on, 2005 and 2006, perfectly stack the moral deck in Bush's favor - after breaking Iraq but before committing to trying to put it back together. In fact, the military "surge" that started in 2007 reduced the chaos the United States had unleashed. The one main character in the war zones is likable, lovable Allison, whose work doesn't involve killing or torturing, and the Iraqi (and Afghan) characters we meet still welcome the Americans as liberators, years into the wars. Ross's government job also consists of doing nice things. The most Republican opinion he expresses isn't very right-wing - annoyance at "P.C. colleagues in his department ... with their theory-ridden view of American history as a sort of ongoing atrocity." In fact, he's a deep-state RINO, finding the new bureaucratic term "homeland ... a trifle Third Reich-ish," and arguing against funding a hagiography of the conservative pundit Norman Podhoretz: "Let's not reject their junk just so we can start pushing our junk." The only contentious domestic policy topic addressed at any length is the ban on federal funding of stem cell research, which Mallon presents as Bush's proudest achievement but also has Nancy Reagan eloquently deride. Otherwise, no contemptible beliefs or behaviors are imputed to anybody. Even grading on a curve with Trump and his administration at one end, that seems strange. Some of the dialogue is reminiscent of the strenuously extra-witty repartee in Aaron Sorkin scripts. As when a German lawyer, flirting with Allie in Baghdad, proposes a "coition of the willing." Or when Ross presses her to accompany him on a business trip, and to his "carpe diem" she replies, "You mean carpe yourperdiem." Or - come on! - as Bush reads through a proposed Iraqi constitution with his national security adviser, "Laura softly sang: 'Sharia, I've just met a law named Sharia.... '" But still, "Landfall" is smart and knowing and absorbing. It is to novels as good studio movies are to movies - extremely well made, satisfying if you have a taste for the genre, occasionally excellent. The prose is a pleasure. For better or worse, I can't imagine a more positive portrayal of George W. Bush in a novel of this quality. And its unconventionality in that sense makes it more interesting than if its take were standard leftish bien-pensant. Fiction is supposed to provide glimpses inside people different from us. As a one-of-a-kind artifact of pre-2016 Late Republicanism, "Landfall" is fascinating. Mallon's novels have traced a pattern in their time travel: He set the first in the recent past (15 years before publication), moved back in history until reaching the 1860s, then reversed course and gradually set them closer and closer to the present. So here's what I'm thinking: His next Washington novel will be set in an even more recent past, and won't be bittersweet and fond but bitter and appalled and vicious, because its main real-life character will be the current Republican president. Mallons recent Washington novels Eire jam-packed with 'real' people. kurt Andersen is the author, most recently, of "Fantasyland" and the co-author, with Alec Baldwin, of "You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump."

*Starred Review* The conclusion to a loose trilogy that includes Watergate (2012) and Finale (2015), Mallon's latest incisive, historically themed novel centers on George W. Bush's second term. It provides an insider's view of how his ambitious agenda gets derailed by the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina and the inept federal response to it. Mallon demonstrates great skill in animating a large cast of prominent personalities, with characterizations ranging from cheekily funny (the banter between Larry King and former Texas governor Ann Richards) to biting (the good-looking, self-interested John Edwards) to deeply empathetic. Readers will find some nods to today's political dramas; for instance, Brett Kavanaugh makes several appearances. Witty conversation ensues as scenes shift between meetings, speeches, elegant dinners, and other domestic and international gatherings, while the depiction of flooded New Orleans is starkly sobering. Against this anxious backdrop, Bush's moods swing from confidence to uncertainty, and two fictional characters, prickly NSC staffer Allison O'Connor and Ross Weatherall, a new federal administrator responsible for updating WPA guidebooks, interact with the real-life figures. Their viewpoints and romance are shaped by their opposing reactions to Bush's policies and their on-the-ground experiences. Mallon's latest fictional portrayal of the American political scene is impressively detailed and enticingly readable.--Sarah Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist

In his fantastic latest, Mallon (Finale) recreates the political events of George W. Bush's years as president-and their impact on Washington, D.C., and the world-so meticulously that they hardly seem the stuff of a fictional narrative. Spanning the decades from 1978, when the future president made a failed congressional bid, to his penultimate year in the White House in 2007, the novel gives dramatic scope and heft to incidents that defined his presidency post-9/11, especially America's invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Hurricane Katrina's ravaging of New Orleans in 2005. (The characters consider the administration's management of these two events somewhat similar.) Mallon provides juicy, humanized depictions of interactions between the familiar talking heads of state-including moments of disdainful disregard between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and between the president and his v-p-that will leave readers wondering how much of what he portrays is imagined. And he uses the personal evasion and deception that challenge the amorous relationship between invented characters Ross Weatherall, a disillusioned director for the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and Allison O'Connor, a key Iraq negotiator in the president's National Security Council, as a lens through which to scrutinize the political strategies of the era. This novel makes a fascinating flesh-and-blood spectacle out of moments now relegated to history. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

4 FEBRUARY 23, 2005 U.S. Ambassador's Residence; Brussels, Belgium "No, sir, you go ahead," said Condi Rice. "I insist."   The basement exercise room contained only one elliptical, the pre­ferred machine of both the president and his secretary of state. "I'll take this," Condi said, getting on the stationary bike.   Bush gave her a wink and a suit-yourself shrug. Where he'd really like to be was out in the Maryland woods on his own mountain bike, leaving the Secret Service in the dust. But the elliptical would do. He was feeling pretty good, almost back to his precampaign weight; for the last couple of weeks Laura had been telling him to dial back the workouts, which had started seeming a little fanatical to her, like his devotion to being on time.   Maybe she was right, but if truth be told, however un-Christian it might be, he couldn't stand being around the unfit. Unless they were lost in political conversation, Rove repelled him, and he couldn't say he'd been surprised when Gerson, that doughy version of Dilton Doi­ley from the Archie comics, had had his heart attack a week before Christmas. He wished Mike the best, but wouldn't mind having him, silver tongue and all, stepping back a bit. For a ghostwriter he was awfully, what would you call it, corporeal : never missed a chance to talk to the press about what a deep and tortured wordsmith he was.   "You think we're overstaying our welcome here?" the president asked Condi. "Three nights seems like a lot."   "Not at all," she assured him, while noticing that his arm and leg movements on the elliptical appeared to cancel each other out--as if drawing X's on the air. "You're saving the taxpayers a big hotel bill!"   Bush cocked his head into the nod-smirk combination that said "I suppose." Tom Korologos, the ambassador upstairs, was a fine guy who went way back with Dad; a blunt, no-b.s. fixer and smoother who'd made a fortune lobbying but had gotten off his seventy-year-old ass to spend four months working under Bremer in Iraq at the start of the occupation. That's what had earned him his perch here, not all the years shuffling between K Street and the White House and the Hill.   "Okay," he said at last, agreeing with Condi on the matter of hospi­tality. "But some of our staff guys are eating Mormon the Greek out of house and home." Korologos, improbably enough, had started life in Utah.   Condi put the pedals of her bike through another ten rotations before asking, "So now that three days have passed, how do you think 'Old Europe' is treating you?"   This was a crack against Rumsfeld, who was never afraid to point out that within the "coalition of the willing," the newer NATO coun­tries, the ones from Eastern Europe, had been a lot more willing than the slack, half-socialist originators of the Western alliance. Blair had had to drag the Brits to Baghdad kicking and screaming. And the rest, of course, were even worse. But Rumsfeld's comments made things harder; Bush had had to sit there yesterday and smile at the EU repre­sentative Don had pronounced irrelevant.   "Well, I enjoyed my breakfast with Tony," the president told Condi, and it was true. Unlikely as it might be, he was sure Blair preferred him to Clinton, even if those two had all that "third way" stuff in common.   "You know, sir," explained Condi, going into her schoolmarm mode, "there's one way in which the U.K. can be considered new Europe instead of old. They didn't join the EU with the first 'Inner Six' members; some years passed before they came in."   He tried to look appreciative above the crablike grindings of the elliptical. "Well, it was a lot more fun having breakfast with Tony than having dinner with Pepé Le Pew." He'd had to host Chirac right here, upstairs, on Monday night, a nauseating couple of hours. They'd pretended to be friends, behaving as if the Axis of Weasel days were actually behind them. He'd found himself wishing he were across a table from Berlusconi, that crude and crazy Italian version of Claytie Williams. "Still, I did my best to behave. I hope you noticed I called the potatoes 'French fries' and not 'freedom' ones. Even though they looked like hash browns to me."   Condi smiled, gratefully, over this bit of conciliation. " Frites ," she said. "Or aiguillettes ."   "Aggie-what?"   "What the French call French fries."   "Well, let 'em eat aiguillettes. It was pretty damned diplomatic of me, I thought."   Over on the bike, Condi was finally breathing through her mouth instead of her nose. "I am glad you told Chirac no," she said, puffing just a little, "when he proposed that Israeli-Palestinian conference."   " Hell no is more like it. That's one mess I leave to you . I once told Clinton, 'You taught yourself the name of every damned street in Jerusalem. Fat lot of good it did you--or anybody over there.' "   He took the elliptical up two notches, and Condi added another full mph to the stationary bike.   "The worst is yet to come," he told her, getting back to the present trip.   "You mean Schröder?"   "Gerhard the Godawful." The German chancellor had gotten himself elected to a second term more or less by running against him . The two of them had a meeting and, even worse, a presser scheduled for this afternoon, all of it down in Mainz, where Dad and Kohl had wowed the locals back in '89. "I'd rather spend an hour with Qadaffi. Or thirty minutes with Gore."   As always, he was pleased when he got a laugh--a matter of the deepest satisfaction to him ever since he'd taken it upon himself, at the age of seven, to cheer up Mother, despairing over the death of his little sister in that hotbox of a house in Midland.   "As it is," he now added, "my time with Gerhard will break Dick's speed record in Afghanistan." Back in December, having gone to Kabul for Karzai's inauguration, Cheney had remained on the ground for less than seven hours.   After a few more scuttlings on the elliptical, he noticed that Condi wasn't saying anything. When it came to Dick, she tended to tread even more cautiously than she did with Rumsfeld.   "What Schröder will hit you hardest on is Vienna," she finally said. The Germans and most of the rest of the Europeans wanted the U.S. to join their talks with the Iranians, as if that were all it would take to get the mullahs to stop a nuclear-weapons program whose existence they didn't even admit.   "Yeah, well, I'll tell Gerhard I'll pencil Vienna in for right after that Israeli-Palestinian conference. Which should be about the twelfth of never." He shot Condi a smile. "You old enough to remember that one?"   "Oh, we listened to a lot of Johnny Mathis in Birmingham, sir. I guarantee you it came over the radio when I was strapped in my car seat."   The two of them went at a fast, even pace for a while, until he sig­naled he was ready for a cool-down. He loved the way this machine was saving his knees.   "I'll get through today, but I wish we were flying back to Fargo instead of Frankfurt." He'd been enjoying all the day trips for the Social Security proposal, the town halls and pep rallies from Omaha to Tampa. For half a day at a time he could trick himself into think­ing he was having the sort of domestic-focused presidency he once expected to have.   "How's that going?" asked Condi.   "Social Security?"   "Yes."   He shrugged. So far there'd been mostly bad news. He explained to her how he'd pissed off Max Baucus, who'd been crucial to tax reform, by barging into Montana without letting the senator know he was descending on his home state. It had been a staff fuckup, but so far there'd been no sign of forgiveness. He could hear a faraway sound creeping into his voice as he talked about it all to Condi. "You know, I've been pushing Social Security reform since I ran against Hance."   She nodded supportively, and he told himself this was no time to get into some all-Kraut funk over Mad Max and Grim Gerhard. He stopped the elliptical and mopped his face with the hand towel. All the white noise vanished from the basement when Condi stopped the stationary bike.   "You're the one that got me into this trip," he teased. They both remembered the memo she'd sent, just after agreeing to take State, telling him that he needed to get serious about making up with the Europeans, no matter how childish they'd been.   "Yes, I was," replied Condi, trying to imitate one of Laura's it's-good-for-you-and-you'll-thank-me smiles.   "What's that phrase you've been using?"   " 'Transformational diplomacy.' But I've also been saying 'freedom' to the Europeans every chance I get."   He had to resist saying "good girl," though it wouldn't be a catas­trophe if the words slipped out. He liked being with Condi because she didn't make him walk any feminist or racial minefield. He was sorry to be seeing less of her these days than when she'd been his NSA, but that was the price to pay for being rid of Powell, who had spent most of the first term looking annoyed, even pained , trying to convince everybody he was doing them a favor just by being there.   "Tell me what you used to say back at the start?" he asked her. There was no need to explain that "the start" meant the beginning of Iraq, in '03. "About the best way to handle the Euros?"   Condi lowered her eyes with a sort of faux bashfulness, as if embar­rassed instead of delighted to be repeating a bit of mischief that had pleased him: " 'Punish France; ignore Germany; forgive Russia.' "   "Love it!" he replied, wiping his face again. "And look forward to China."   There was no need to explain this, either. He mentioned the 2008 Olympics in Beijing as often as a high school teacher motivatingly invoked the coming senior class trip. As the administration's top sports fans, he and Condi would revel in that farewell junket more than anyone else. In fact, he was almost alarmed by the intensity of his yearning for it. He'd enjoyed his new sense of legitimacy for about two weeks after last fall's clear-cut reelection, before realizing how much he already wanted the whole thing to be over. Excerpted from Landfall: A Novel by Thomas Mallon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.