Novel of the week: Watergate by Thomas Mallon

last updated 8 January 2015

(Pantheon, $27)

Thomas Mallon has written a “stealth bull’s-eye of a political novel,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. This “lively, witty” fictionalized take on the Watergate scandal is a study in subtly great storytelling. In one episode, we’re observing Washington socialites at a boisterous soiree when the realization slowly creeps up on us that it’s “that Saturday night”—the night a paranoid President Nixon effectively forced out his own attorney general. Another of Mallon’s smart tactics is to give much of the story over to historically minor characters, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. While Woodward and Bernstein are barely footnotes, presidential aide Fred LaRue becomes the “troubled conscience of the novel,” and Alice Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, its “sharp tongue.” Then again, Mallon’s portrayal of Nixon—“sympathetic but spiked with satire”—steals the show. “By the end,” Mallon’s Nixon is a modern King Lear, crushed, penniless, and “raving on the wild heath of political disgrace.”