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'Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years': Compelling historical fiction from Thomas Mallon

'Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years': Compelling historical fiction from Thomas Mallon

Thomas Mallon’s latest historical fiction covers the second half of 1986, when President Ronald Reagan was peaking and about to enter his decline. That year, the Gipper was playing consequential games on the world stage, including a high-stakes one of nuclear disarmament and a scandal that came to be known as Iran-Contra.

While those events constitute the underpinning of this catty, entertaining novel, what consumes the astute and well-informed Mr. Mallon is political give-and-take, both domestic and international.


“FINALE”
By Thomas Mallon
Pantheon ($27.95).

His theatrical novel brings to life historical figures who long ago became historical footnotes: John Hinckley Jr., the would-be assassin who almost killed Mr. Reagan; Donald Regan, Mr. Reagan’s embattled chief of staff; and Walter Annenberg, the publisher and philanthropist who never failed to throw Ronnie and Nancy Reagan a helluva party.

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Indeed, Mr. Mallon drops names like a champ, giving body to such players as the serially married political courtesan Pamela Harriman, the badly damaged but oddly game Richard Nixon, and lesser lights of the period such as actress Bette Davis, suave political operator Robert Strauss and the smooth socialite Kitty Carlisle Hart.

Mr. Mallon makes the disgraced former president, a complex and baffling figure, curiously sympathetic. Mr. Nixon’s interaction with the White House after his resignation plays a part here and is plausible. Mr. Mallon also fictionalizes his friend, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens.   It is the acerbic Hitchens who uncovers the scandals that corrode the Reagan administration in Iran-Contra. It is the knowing Mr. Hitchens who becomes far more than a journalist, ultimately squeezing a smidgen of good out of the tainted money at the heart of that exchange.

Mr. Mallon can twist language like a knife. Here is his take on Ms. Hart: “Kitty, in her unending prime, was like some lovely black-bristled, silver hairbrush come to life -- a perfect, confidence-inspiring implement with which to start or end, or just touch up, the day.” 

Mr. Mallon also elevates to prominence characters as unequally weighted as Nancy Reagan, the timorous and solicitous spirit who hovers over the book, and Anders Little, the sexually conflicted National Security Council mole. Their moves, which rarely intersect, are among the most compelling in a book that reads like a divertissement, but resonates far deeper.

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Mr. Mallon skillfully interweaves the personal and the political. Follow Mr. Little as he tries to reconcile his political beliefs with personal predilections he does his best to suppress. Follow Mr. Little’s friend, anti-nuclear activist Anne McMurray, as she comes to terms with a failed marriage and recognizes that politics requires far more than attitude. Follow several lesser characters as they struggle to remain true to themselves at a time when AIDS cast its first long shadow, when homosexuality was far more underground than today.

It’s weirdly comforting to read a novel in which the characters are so familiar. Mr. Mallon’s vivid take on this period in American politics rings true. He effectively gets inside his characters’ heads, too.

The one head Mr. Mallon doesn’t get inside, except in a brilliant epilogue at the very end, is Mr. Reagan’s — which is eerily appropriate, even faithful. Mr. Reagan was equally opaque and sunny. While tagged as the Great Communicator, he often defaulted to platitude, so many questioned his depth.

When Mr. Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R., are about to embark on two days of talks in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, the president of Iceland welcomes Mr. Reagan. What Vigdis Finnbogadottir, the first female president of a European country, saw in Mr. Reagan was difficult for her to describe to her friends. “He seemed all at once very close and far away; rather silly and a little mystical. Like the canvas-and-fur coat, he was composed of two elements that seemed to alternate but never add up. She could hear herself telling those friends that he might be the most deeply shallow man she’d ever met. It would not be a witticism, and she would mean it, she thought, more as a compliment than criticism.” 

The picture she conjures sticks.

Carlo Wolff is a staff reporter for the Cleveland Jewish News.

First Published: September 13, 2015, 4:00 a.m.

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"Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years" by Thomas Mallon.
Thomas Mallon, author of "Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years."  (William Bodenschatz)
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