A Man You Could Love
By John Callahan
Fulcrum Publishing
Golden, CO, 2007
Fiction doesn't usually find a place on the front page of political blogs, but this exquisite first novel by John Callahan isn't ordinary fiction--it's a literary feat and at the same time a political junkie's dream story, steeped in the nuts and bolts and heart and soul of four decades of Democratic politics. It's "West Wing" stretched across decades, and without the snark, slowed down to 33 rpm.
A Man You Could Love is a highly literary work, as one would expect from Callahan. He's Morgan S. Odell professor of humanities of Lewis and Clark College, literary executor for Ralph Ellison, and was responsible for editing and shepherding Ellison's last novel, Juneteenth, to publication. He's also a former congressional candidate, was on the Oregon ballot as Eugene McCarthy's running mate in 1968, and is incidentally an old friend and adviser to me.
Against the backdrop of the 2000 Florida recount, Callahan's story winds through four decades of politics told from the perspective of Gabe Bontempo, a political operative sidelined for the Florida fight by a mysterious blood disorder that may or may not be life-threatening. The counts and recounts in Florida, red and blue, are paralleled in the counts and recounts in Bontempo's blood, red and white. In the days of not knowing, Bontempo watches and waits in seclusion far away on the Oregon coast, and remembers.
What he remembers is his decades-long friendship and political partnership with Mick Whelan, the man through whom Bontempo could live his political ambitions. Equally matched in political acumen and street-smarts, Whelan is clearly the front man in this operation, the one with the charisma and the charm and the ego to be the one in front of the cameras, his name on the ballot.
Whelan and Bontempo first meet in 1963, the night before the March on Washington, Bontempo an errand boy in Robert Kennedy's Justice Department sent down to get intelligence on the SNCC, and Whelan the activist. Over the next decade, their political paths continue to cross--Bontempo working for the 1968 presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy and Whelan working for the campaign of Eugene McCarthy--and their friendship deepens. In the early 70s, Whelan decides to run for Congress from Oregon and asks Bontempo to manage his campaign.
This is where the meat of the story starts for the political junkies among us. One of the book's reviewers found this to be a major flaw: "If the legislative process in all its glory is your idea of prime entertainment, by all means dive in. If your passion for legislation falls somewhat short of that, you may find yourself skimming over lengthy passages of this otherwise worthy novel." It is prime entertainment, as is the in-depth and inside knowledge of Oregon that infuses the book.
Through real and imagined geography and events, Callahan weaves together fact and fiction, realism and idealism. Political assassinations, volcanic eruptions, tragedies small and large drive the narrative of the lives of these two friends, children of the 1960s who somehow maintain their idealism and continue to try to fight the good fight. That idealism carries through the culminating political and legislative battle of the novel, when on the heels of victory in the first Gulf War, the president tries to push through legislation authorizing a preemptive use of force in Latin America. In this debate, Callahan through Whelan gives us the debate we should have had on Iraq, imbues the Senate with the kind of dignity we would hope it would have in deciding issues of war and peace. It's a Senate in which thoughtful debate wins the day, in which votes are pre-ordained and set in stone, a Senate that does the people's will.
Which is the joy and the purpose of fiction--to reimagine our world as it could be, as it might be, as we would like it to be. But while idealistic, Callahan's novel isn't naive. As many or more battles are lost in the political calculation as are won. Win or lose, continuing the game--and not losing sight of the ultimate goal--is what matters.
I have to add a personal note: as a student and friend of John Callahan, the book was a joy for me to read. It took me back to all those senior seminars at the Hillsdale Pub when we sat around talking poetry over microbrews and mounds of greasy fries. It took me back to the first inklings that my unimaginative mind could get poetry, could find the rhythm, could locate the essence, and could love it. That wasn't a small feat on Callahan's part. I might still never have it in me to write poetry, but Callahan opened it up for me nonetheless. And in some ways, with this novel Callahan opened up a bit of politics for me. The hard-headed and unimaginative realist in me might have read some parts and thought, "it doesn't work like that," but the tiny part that can still hear poetry thought "it could work like that."