May/June 2001

THE COLUMNIST

A Novel
by Jeffrey Frank
Simon & Schuster. 232pages. $22.00

BY ERIC ALTERMAN

Take it from somebody who spent four years (plus a second edition) trying to pierce the heart of darkness that beats beneath the Washington punditocracy: there are some truths buried so deep beneath layers of self-protective blubber and blabber that no amount of journalistic excavation can unearth them. That's why God invented the novel.

Jeffrey Frank's astonishingly self-assured first fiction packs a curiously subtle wallop. One begins reading The Columnist with two questions foremost in the mind: First, just whom, exactly, is he parodying? And second, how will I ever make it through 232 pages of deliberately stultifying prose with this pompous ass of a narrator?

Fortunately, both questions answer themselves pretty easily. Though Frank will deny it, the asshole/narrator is instantly recognizable as George Will, leavened with a sprinkling of Sidney Blumenthal and a dash of Joseph Kraft, though nobody's dates exactly match. (Ben Bradlee and the New Republic's literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, also come in for some gentle ribbing in supporting roles.) The second question, however, is tougher to answer. Suffice to say that despite this unpromising material, Frank has found his hero a narrative voice that works like pornography on your attention span. Before you know it, you've stuck with this bastard until you've already reached the phony index at the end ("Johnson, Lyndon B, and private conversations p. 103-5"; "Sports, love of, see horsemanship").

The plot? Well, it's not terribly important, but it begins with ex-President Bush allegedly entreating the author -- at "the cocktail party in the home of a wise cabinet officer, one of those happy occasions when everything is 'off the record,' when we're Americans first and antagonists second" -- to "write it down. Don't hold back." Bush claims to have been having that very conversation "the other day with Bar" -- about how "Brandon Sladder must know everyone who matters," and adding, "We never missed your column." "Bush the elder," Sladder reports, added that he and Bar always found our hero to be "tough" but "fair" and "always put your country first." The anecdote closes with the party's host informing Brandon of "an important policy change toward one of those hostile little nations that remind one of poisonous insects," though Brandon had a little trouble paying attention: as his thoughts "were elsewhere -- on my next column, of course (I permitted myself a quick, private tour d'horizon), and what I'd say on my television appearance that very evening." Perfect.

This self-important story might be true for any reasonably well-known insider pundit, so promiscuously are phony compliments paid to those with the power to return them in ink purchased by the barrel or over the now overcrowded cable lines. What we get is a Bildungsroman of the kind of guy who tattled on his college roommate for bringing girls back to his room and then felt persecuted by "strangers who unaccountably wanted to hurt him" when he discovered that said roommate, "Kip," retaliated by peeing all over his clothing and the rest of his classmates ostracized him. When Sladder is blackballed from all the fraternities on campus, even "the ones for admitted outcasts," he blames what he calls "Kipist forces" as if to tie them to the Vietcong.

The rest of the story is an old-fashioned one. Ambitious boy returns home to Buffalo, destroys parents' life, destroys girlfriend's life, and is run out of town by newspaper boss, only to be let loose in Washington where the very qualities that made him a pariah in college and at home turn out to be just what it takes to get ahead as a pundit. In Sally Quinn's hometown, people expect to be thrown over when something better in the line of a "friend" comes along, and are more than eager to do the same to you should their fortunes (read "job" ) give them an unexpected tug up the status ladder. Or as Sladder tells the reader, "As my column became more popular, so did I." And so it goes.

Whether eating, sleeping, defecating, or procreating, Sladder is really engaged in only one true task: identifying and pleasing his masters. His "complicated" views on Vietnam are indistinguishable in temper and importance from his views on which cocktail party to attend or whose daughter to try to seduce. (This one's family goes riding with the Bouviers; that one's daddy owns a small opinion magazine, etc, etc.) He has one set of views on Vietnam when he's sucking up to Jack Kennedy, another when providing the sieve through which Lyndon Johnson leaks his lies, and yet a third when showing uncommon sympathy for the trials and tribulations of Richard Nixon. Each is filtered through the perceived views of his paper's editors and owners. (Some of the funniest lines in the book occur when Sladder finds himself in the presence of his paper's Ben Bradlee-esque editor and suddenly starts salting every other sentence with a "fuck" or "shit" as though a vocabulary transplant operation had gone slightly awry.) When Sladder's smug parochialism is occasionally interrupted by a genuine personal crisis -- a failing marriage or an unhappy daughter -- he is entirely bereft of such skills as intimacy, empathy, and courage.

On the one hand, Frank is lampooning the pomposity of the pundit's self-absorption and feigned understanding of world affairs. But that part is shooting fish in a barrel. We hardly need his novelistic talents to know that that 95 percent of what we read and hear from these "Sabbath Gasbags" (Calvin Trillin's term) is made up on the spot. Where Frank's talents as novelist take us into new territory is allowing us a peek at the psychic costs these clowns pay for playing someone they would like us to think they are 24/7 while knowing full well inside themselves that they cannot measure up.

I once attended a cocktail party given by a liberal politico in Washington where a well-respected Washington Post foreign-affairs columnist and editorial-page editor told a story about a diplomat he considered to be the only "really first-class Indonesian they've had in about thirty years." I marveled as the people around him nodded in agreement, as if the man were saying nothing unusual, much less outrageously ignorant, racist, and patently ridiculous. For years, while writing books and articles about Washington pundits, I've tried to understand how someone who appeared to be relatively intelligent and, in many respects, sort of decent, could make so gross a statement without knowing what a jerk he was making of himself. Well, Jeffrey Frank has finally answered my question and he has done so in a novel that is a pleasure to read. Frank (with whom I am friendly in a cocktail party sort of way), is now an editor at The New Yorker, but he spent many decades at The Washington Post and The Washington Star. My only question is how so subversive a writing talent managed to survive that ordeal when so many fine minds before him have been vanquished by the cushy comforts of our capital's consensual obliviousness. The Columnist is a marvelously fitting tribute to the men and women who make it -- and remake it -- every Sunday morning.

Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation, Worth, and MSNBC.com and the author of three books, including Sound & Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy.