P.R. in D.C.

This is a vision obviously shared by Jeffrey Frank, the former Washington newspaperman turned novelist and New Yorker staffer. His first novel, “The Columnist,” was a very funny “autobiography” of an opportunistic Washington columnist; his latest, “Bad Publicity,” mocks the capital’s everlasting brown-nosing and backstabbing through the misadventures of a loosely interwoven cast of characters in desperate search of preferment, fame, or, if all else fails, notoriety.

Frank sets his scene in the late 1980s. The reason for going back in time–backstage power-brokering has not changed in the intervening years, after all, and it probably never will–would seem to be that Frank needed a pathetic and hopeless presidential candidate on whom his characters can pin their ambitions, and no candidate in recent history has been quite as pathetic and hopeless as Michael Dukakis.

“Bad Publicity”‘s Democrats, who have languished in obscurity through the long Reagan years, are now “eager planets orbiting this chilly sun.” Onto their unlikely hero they have projected the wisdom of Solomon and the charisma of Elvis: Frank has one think-tank windbag gushing (and haven’t we all heard this sort of monologue, ad nauseam?) about “how amazing Mike is, how really aware of all these ideas. He has an almost superhuman ability–I don’t know how else to put it–to absorb the implications of almost everything.” To which his colleague, a man who really knows better and who in his saner moments even dismisses the candidate as a “Greek dwarf,” pompously concurs: “I know he has a rigorous intellect.”

Frank centers his tale on Charles Dingleman, a middle-aged counsel at a big law firm who has never recovered from the loss of his (Republican) congressional seat three years earlier. He misses Congress; he misses “the cheap haircuts, the saunas and pool, his own staff, the stationery”; most of all he misses being Somebody. His work at Thingeld, Pine & Sconce is entirely penance.

Charlie is also an amiable good ol’ boy who has somehow failed to realize that in the modern world, flirtation is construed as harassment. He commits the error of a lifetime in making a pass at Judith Grust, a young legal associate: good-looking, politically doctrinaire, and an aging lecher’s worst nightmare. Soon Charlie is branded as a sexual deviant and ousted from the firm.

In a bid to get back into the loop, he retains the services of Big Tooth, a large public-relations firm with a mostly political clientele. Big Tooth specializes in the Big Sell.

“I was reading up on you,” one of the firm’s eager executives tells Huntington Draeb, the sleaziest of Thingeld, Pine’s sharks. “I was thinking how I want to see you involved with some humanitarian cause. It would be very good for you at this point in your career, believe me . . . Maybe a Third World country you’ve never been involved with?”

All this is good fun, but in truth Frank hardly scratches the surface of Washington PR, a far more grotesque business even than the Hollywood variety: Recent administrations, after all, have spent many millions of taxpayer dollars hiring Madison Avenue firms to launch campaigns to “sell America” and other, equally vaporous, assignments, while the fictional Big Tooth is limited to smaller fry like “a psychotic Latin American colonel who wanted to open an orphanage.”

Charlie’s path soon crosses that of Hank Morriday, another apparent loser. Hank, a Democrat, is a think-tank drone, an authority on welfare reform who is losing faith and even interest in his subject: “He would sometimes think about all those people who couldn’t hold real jobs and realize that he could not imagine holding any of those jobs himself.” Professionally and socially graceless, Hank can only watch with impotent envy while competitors, like the unqualified but smooth Suzanne Smule, get all the party invitations and television appearances. “Although no one could remember what she’d ever said, no one could remember her being without something to say.”

ALL THESE CHARACTERS flounder around more or less ineptly in the Washington fishpond, well aware that, in the words of Charlie’s ex-wife, “when people lose in this town it’s like they die. But they don’t get buried and rot like real dead people, they stick around, and everybody hopes they leave.” They watch their backs and are ill at ease among the Washington bigshots, “representatives of a tribe from a place where the custom required strong deodorant, regular applications of talcum powder, bold-striped suits, and unblinking eyes.”

Frank’s characters can only be called despicable, but he has a nice knack for making us like them anyway; they are humanized by their weaknesses. Even the terrible Judith is not a monster but simply an awkward woman who honestly can’t understand why she doesn’t have more friends: “She knew that . . . a funny, carefree spirit lay just beneath her outward formality. Yet whenever she spoke, people seemed apprehensive, as if she were about to reveal hideous news.” And when account executive Candy Romulade, who has devoted her best years to Big Tooth and its nefarious goals, is finally fired, she can only feel joyful, imagining “how it would feel to do something else, almost anything else.”

In the end we come close to being fond of these people, and feel oddly satisfied when the least baneful of “Bad Publicity”‘s characters end up, if only for a brief moment perhaps, on top.

Brooke Allen is a writer in New York City.