Senator

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 1994년 4월 4일

If Bowker ( Replica ) hasn't combined The Last Hurrah and All the King's Men , he's come pretty close. Narrator James O'Connor, a young Republican Senator in heavily Democratic Massachusetts, has a month to go in his reelection campaign when he finds the body of ex-mistress Amanda in her Back Bay Boston apartment. The plot tracks O'Connor's attempts to find the killer, avert scandal and win the election, but the real story concerns the Senator's relations with his family: a privacy-craving wife, a precocious daughter, a widowed father and a ne'er-do-well older brother born the same year as he, his ``Irish twin.'' Almost as important are his trials with friends and foes, including a campaign worker in love with him, a manager with White House dreams, a slavishly devoted driver, the archenemy Boston D.A. and the Governor trying for his seat. All these characters come alive, most notably an emotionally restrained, proud, puckish father, who laments: ``Two sons . . . one a lush, the other a Republican. Where did I go wrong?'' Though the political setting rings wonderfully true, we don't quite see the rather stiff-necked narrator as a natural politician, much less as a lover of the glamorous Amanda. But the plot remains practically bullet-proof, right up to the surprising, ambiguous ending.