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. I finished the last page and wept for an hour I remain stunned forty-eight hours later.

“I was thrilled, captivated, deeply moved, and wholly subsumed by the world that Tom Mallon created…The book is fever dream, wolf whistle, and history as plain and simple human longing the book encapsulates no less than everything. “Titles to Pick Up Now,” O, The Oprah Magazine Political scandal seem more colorfully real than ever in this fictional Ruthless, paranoid, sometimes farcically inept architects of America’s biggest More fun-loving types can take Watergate as lively, witty drama.” - New York Times His cleverly counterintuitive Watergate even has the name-dropping panache of a Hollywood tell-all. fine, boisterous historical tableau.Readers who deem the book’s liberties too free can stick to the tonnage of Watergate memoirs, transcripts, investigative, and marginalia. “In this stealth bull’s-eye of a political novel, Thomas Mallon invests the Watergate affair with all the glitter, glamour, suave grace, and subtlety that it doesn’t often get. Rose Mary Wood, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Pat Nixon (to whom he gives a lover!), and Fred LaRue.

Mallon's novel brings a number of the principals to life, esp. 'I followed the Watergate hearings during the summer of '73 the way some people keep up with soap operas. Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his “splendid evocation of Washington,” Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy which surpasses even that attained in his previous novels and turns a “third-rate burglary” into tumultuous, first-rate entertainment. 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. From one of our most esteemed historical novelists comes a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators.įor 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.

Watergate by Thomas Mallon