Trudy Hopedale
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
On the eve of the 2000 election, the charmed life of Washington hostess Trudy Hopedale is quietly falling apart. Her daytime talk show is about to be hijacked by a younger, prettier assistant, and then there is the horrifying novel that her husband has written in secret, which contains some rather troubling implications for a former Foreign Service colleague. And what is her mother-in-law telling everyone?
Trudy's dear friend Donald Frizzé has benefited greatly from their friendship. A widely recognized expert on the U.S. vice presidency and a frequent guest on Trudy's program, Donald's latest scholarly pursuit is a highly anticipated biography of Garrett Augustus Hobart, McKinley's VP. Exactly who anticipates this book is hard to say, and soon Donald finds himself dodging the awkward questions of plagiarism and his sexuality, frequently during the same conversation.
Amid tides of intrigue and shifting allegiances, this little town's extraordinary inhabitants swim helplessly, and alarmingly, toward their remarkable fates. With a bewitching sense of nostalgia, Jeffrey Frank has written an exquisitely funny, tender, and deeply perceptive novel that vividly invokes the simpler world of only yesterday.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pettiness, backstabbing, social striving and tit-for-tat favors are "the gasoline in this town" Washington, D.C. in the third fast-paced, entertaining Beltway sendup from New Yorker editor Frank (following The Columnist and Bad Publicity). As the Clintons make way for the Bushes in 2000 2001, the novel follows Trudy Hopedale, television host of a certain age and D.C. social mainstay, who is fast fading into political and social obsolescence. Trudy's husband, Roger, is a retired career Foreign Service man with a shady past who is working on an embarrassing novel, while "handsome and brilliant" vice-presidential biographer Donald Frizz is suffering from writer's block. As the gelling Bush administration creates shifting power dynamics and loyalties, readers must read between the lines to gather information from these three very different unreliable narrators, each with secrets and ulterior motives of his or her own. Supporting cast members are one-dimensional, and Trudy can seem too petty even for satire, but Frank's lively writing and sharp eye for the story's fourth major character, the "soiled town" that is political Washington, carry the day.
