Deep into historical novelist Thomas Mallon's latest novel, Watergate, it all falls into place. This is the Nixon presidency as viewed through the lens of Mad Men.
The realization hits about the time that Rose Mary Woods has created the 18 1/2-minute gap in the tapes not out of loyalty to her boss, but out of pique by a chauvanistic advertising guy on a power trip. Meanwhile, Fred LaRue is in hiding with a Democratic operative who feels obligated out of not loyalty, but more as a matter of feeling responsible as the grown-up in the relationship. And Pat Nixon quietly enjoys the old memory of lunches when people didn't pay attention to her, knowing her fate for being a loyal wife will not be happy.
As a historical novelist, Mallon is a master at putting the reader into the sense of what it was like to live during the early 1970s. The novel is practically an homage as the end of that Mad Men era, and not just because of all the hard liquor and distaste expressed by so many characters about how the times are changing. The female characters are remarkable portraits of intelligent, ambitious and loving people trapped by their societal roles. Those who try to break the mold are either punished or, at the least, don't win.
How one perceives this novel could well depend not so much on the merits of the work itself, but what one brings to it. Much of this novel may not make sense if one didn't live through 1972-73, when a third-rate burglary either took down a presidency or revealed a cancer on the honor of the nation. And how a reader reacts to the book could well depend on whether he thinks what happened to Nixon was just.
For those of us who were amazed and appalled at the events and people of those times as they unfolded, Watergate (and Vietnam) remain definitive. For anyone to take on the whole scope of Watergate -- the burglars, the politicians, CRP (or CREEP, or Committe to Re-Elect the President), Woodward and Bernstein, Mrs. Nixon and the girls, and, at the dark center of it all, Richard Milhous Nixon, the drinking and cussing Quaker who carpet bombed Vietnam during peace talks -- how could all that fit into one novel? And be readable?
Mallon has found a way to make it work by focusing on several characters. But they are not all the usual ones. There is as much from the viewpoint of Alice Roosevelt Longworth as there is from both Nixons. Unexpectedly, the central character to the whole story, the one who can put all the pieces together, is LaRue. Mallon says LaRue's life is the one most tampered with. The results are the stuff of which conjecture is used to make sense of events.
The acts of both LaRue and Woods, and reactions to their acts, are used by Mallon to create not a tragedy, but a farce. This is how a presidency self-destructs? Are you kidding? Well, no. And that's why using Alice as a character also makes great sense. This woman of one liners who says late in the novel that someone should have seen that the great promise she had was wasted demonstrates both sides of the coin for both Nixon and his presidency. There is tawdry pettiness and there is the dark desire to not be overshadowed hanging over the characters of this novel and the real Watergate scandal as clearly as any storm cloud that blocks the sun.
Both Woods and LaRue are moved late in the book to read about themselves in books written by others in the scandal's aftermath. Both are crushed by what they read. Both see injustice done to them.
Overalll, though, the farce Mallon has constructed shows its sturdy underpinnings in tragedy. What if Pat Nixon had had a chance to be happy? What if Rose Mary Woods had been respected by Haldeman? What if Alice Roosevelt Longworth had forged a life with the man she really loved? How fulfilling would their lives have been? How might history have been different? And how might the men in their lives have messed it all up any way?