Landfall
A Novel
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Beschreibung des Verlags
Set during the tumultuous middle of the George W. Bush years—amid the twin catastrophes of the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina—Landfall brings Thomas Mallon's cavalcade of contemporary American politics, which began with Watergate and continue with Finale, to a vivid and emotional climax.
The president at the novel's center possesses a personality whose high-speed alternations between charm and petulance, resoluteness and self-pity, continually energize and mystify the panoply of characters around him. They include his acerbic, crafty mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush; his desperately correct and eager-to-please secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice; the gnomic and manipulative Donald Rumsfeld; foreign leaders from Tony Blair to Vladimir Putin; and the caustic one-woman chorus of Ann Richards, Bush's predecessor as governor of Texas. A gallery of political and media figures, from the widowed Nancy Reagan to the philandering John Edwards to the brilliantly contrarian Christopher Hitchens, bring the novel and the era to life.
The story is deepened and driven by a love affair between two West Texans, Ross Weatherall and Allison O'Connor, whose destinies have been affixed to Bush's since they were teenagers in the 1970s. The true believer and the skeptic who end up exchanging ideological places in a romantic and political drama that unfolds in locations from New Orleans to Baghdad and during the parties, press conferences, and state funerals of Washington, D.C.
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In his fantastic latest, Mallon (Finale) recreates the political events of George W. Bush's years as president and their impact on Washington, D.C., and the world so meticulously that they hardly seem the stuff of a fictional narrative. Spanning the decades from 1978, when the future president made a failed congressional bid, to his penultimate year in the White House in 2007, the novel gives dramatic scope and heft to incidents that defined his presidency post-9/11, especially America's invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Hurricane Katrina's ravaging of New Orleans in 2005. (The characters consider the administration's management of these two events somewhat similar.) Mallon provides juicy, humanized depictions of interactions between the familiar talking heads of state including moments of disdainful disregard between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and between the president and his v-p that will leave readers wondering how much of what he portrays is imagined. And he uses the personal evasion and deception that challenge the amorous relationship between invented characters Ross Weatherall, a disillusioned director for the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and Allison O'Connor, a key Iraq negotiator in the president's National Security Council, as a lens through which to scrutinize the political strategies of the era. This novel makes a fascinating flesh-and-blood spectacle out of moments now relegated to history.
