Watergate

If ever a historical event was worthy of a comic novel, it's Watergate, and Mallon, with several outstanding historical novels to his credit (most recently, Fellow Travelers), has the skills to write it. What a cast of characters we meet! Ex-spy G. Gordon Liddy is nearly certifiable; his colleague H. Howard Hunt's hold on reality seems equally tenuous at times. Around them floats a cast of clowns and self-serving creeps who make the familiar story a veritable opera buffa. At the top, clinging desperately to his fading political success, is Nixon, a complicated man who can't understand why people don't trust him. Events unfold through the perspectives of six characters: Republican Party fixer Fred LaRue; ex-spook Hunt; 90-year-old society madam Alice Roosevelt Longworth; Nixon's doggedly loyal secretary, Rose Woods; Nixon himself; and his wife, Pat, who comes across as far from the plastic Barbie Doll she's usually portrayed to be. There are no surprise revelations here, but Mallon writes with such swagger that it all seems new again.