Watergate: A Novel - Hardcover

Mallon, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307378721 ISBN 13: 9780307378729

Publisher: Pantheon, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Featured Guest Review: James Ellroy on Watergate

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed L.A. Quartet:  The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz.

I was thrilled, captivated, deeply moved and wholly subsumed by the world that Tom Mallon created. Washington D.C. from '72 to '74 circumscribes farce, tragedy, a reimagining of the political landscape and the reinstigation of grandeur into the fictional body politic. The book is fever dream, wolf whistle and history as plain and simple human longing; the book encapsulates no less than everything. I finished the last page and wept for an hour; I remain stunned 48 hours later. The laughter, the horror, the pathos, the tawdry drama of small people and their fatuous lusts and drives--ever falling short--but, somehow--achieving a transcendental interconnectedness. Watergate is certainly a masterpiece. More importantly, it is a concurrently credible and fantastic subversion of all our perceived notions of a smugly overreported event and an underscrutinized time and place. By casting Richard Nixon as heroic and as misunderstood as the man considered himself to be, Tom has reset the time-lock on every didactic and dismissive polemic and psych-bio ever written about our 37th president. Here, Nixon himself achieves grandeur; here, he will live as the embodiment of glorious intransigence and twisted courage.

About the Author:

Thomas Mallon is the author of eight novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Fellow Travelers, and seven works of nonfiction. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. He lives in Washington, D.C.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0307378721
• ISBN 13: 9780307378729
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448