Watergate: A Novel - Softcover

Mallon, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307474658 ISBN 13: 9780307474650

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Notable Book
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of 2012
A 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Finalist

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 reconstruct 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. Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy that surpasses even what he attained in his previous novels, and 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. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and The Atlantic, among other publications.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0307474658
• ISBN 13: 9780307474650
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448