This Is How It Starts
A Novel
-
- USD 13.99
-
- USD 13.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, Grant Ginder’s phenomenal debut novel follows one post-collegiate idealist on his quest to fit in with—and then distance himself from—capital hill’s up-andcoming political and social elite who work hard but play harder.
Meet Taylor Mark: a recent college graduate who has moved to Washington, D.C. to work for John Grayson, the less-than-brilliant congressman from his home district in Southern California. Washington is a city where deals are made behind closed doors, and there’s no one better to teach Taylor—and Grayson—that lesson than Chase Latham, Taylor’s former college roommate and the son of a powerful lobbyist. To Chase, the beltway’s bars, restaurants, townhouses, and government offices are one big, debauched playground—a land of milk and honey where secrets are currency, the sex is bipartisan, and rules and boundaries are obsolete. It’s a place, Taylor quickly discovers, where the line between right and wrong is razor-thin and loyalty based on college friendship quickly becomes a thing of the past. This Is How It Starts is a sharp and incisively written novel about how far one young man will go to be an insider in a town that is unyielding in what it will take from a person in exchange for granting him a margin of knowledge and power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A University of Pennsylvania graduate moves to Washington, D.C., to work as a congressional aide in Ginder's lightly cynical Bright Lights, Big City treatment of Washington. Taylor Mark seems more interested in Late Night Shots parties (a displaced WASP social phenomenon) than political parties as he learns the ropes on Capital Hill, so the political satire feels mild compared to the social commentary Ginder offers about the Beltway social scene. Taylor begins an affair with his congressman's unhappy wife (she's a "gorgeous disaster") and begins to doubt the character of his super-wealthy best friend, Chase Latham, son of a prominent Republican lobbyist who has a thing going with Taylor's cousin. But it seems Ginder has never met a clich he didn't want to enshrine: here, wives of wealthy husbands are catty, gay men write gossip columns, rich guys are laddish boors and their parents are absent, medicated or disapproving. Although light on plot and character development, the author does manage to expose the Hill rat lifestyle with some scalpel-sharp observations, showing that snobbery and envy are bipartisan values.
