It is the mark of boys to mistake how things work for why they work, to become fascinated with the mechanisms that make the wheels go ’round and forget to watch where the train is going.
Spin, a racy and fast-paced debut novel by a twenty-six-year-old former California Republican political operator named Tom Lowe, has just this as its ostensible theme. But Spin — widely advertised as giving to Republicans the richly deserved skewering the Democrats received in Primary Colors — turns out to have immaturity as its theme in an even deeper sense than its author intends.
In his thinly fictionalized story, Lowe relates the adventures of a pretty-boy character named Jim Asher who — matching Lowe himself in every detail — returns as a young man from the Gulf War, joins as an unpaid volunteer an unsuccessful Republican campaign for Senate, rises rapidly through the party ranks, leads a wild life of drinking and leching, becomes the youngest press secretary of a speaker of the California Assembly, and leaves politics in disgust. And along the way in Spin, Lowe unpleasantly caricatures many of his old friends — fellow passengers in the train wreck of Michael Huffington’s 1994 Senate campaign and the special 1995 California Assembly election in which four Republican campaign workers eventually pleaded guilty to arranging a decoy Democratic candidate.
The picture Spin paints in rather broad strokes is of a young man whose intelligence and will — finding no limits in the rewarding world of political campaigning — bring him to disaster. But Lowe’s solution is not the reformation of an empty self. It is rather the rejection of what he declares the emptiness of party politics. The most that the author and hero of Spin alike can affirm at the end is a vague libertarianism. When the moment at last arrives in which one must take charge of one’s own thoughts and choose a destination, the boy gets off the train.
Anthony Trollope captured the boyishness of politics in his series of Victorian parliamentary stories — still the best political novels ever written — with the character of Phineas Finn, a handsome and rising young politician for whom the process of getting elected is so much more interesting than anything he might do in Parliament. Indeed, politics becomes for Phineas almost indistinguishable from sex, as he unsuccessfully courts one young Whig heiress after another in search of the ineffably lovable combination of beauty, money, and political influence.
Of course, Trollope knew that Phineas would remain a boy — wouldn’t become a novel’s proper hero — until he learned the concrete application of abstract ideas that makes up the political life of an adult. But somewhere during the century since Trollope, people seem to have forgotten the limits of boyish fascinations. There was something of a boom of political fiction in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but even in the best of those political tales — Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, Gore Vidal’s play The Best Man — you see an artistic preference for describing the mechanisms of power rather than the uses.
Something of a milestone was reached with the 1972 Robert Redford film The Candidate. The Oscar-winning script by Jeremy Larner relied to some degree on the hackneyed notion that candidates enter politics filled with ideals only to be compelled to betray them. But that was mostly a conventional front to hide the fact that the movie was actually fascinated not with candidates and their ideas but with the professionalism of political campaign managers.
And virtually every political novel and movie since has taken political candidates as little more than animated occasions for the real work of political professionals. Even the 1996 Primary Colors, ostensibly a barely disguised personality study of Bill Clinton as a modern Phineas Finn running for president, turned out to be mostly about the nuts and bolts of campaigning.
With Tom Lowe’s Spin as a political tale, however, we have at last reached the point where candidates and ideas have ceased to exist. Since the book is set inside the Republican party, unavoidable references are occasionally made to “policy wonks” and opponents of abortion. But such folk are immediately mocked and quickly dismissed as having nothing to do with the real life of the party. Spinning a fast line to the media, making it with the girls on the campaign trail, getting drunk whenever possible, and winning elections are the only things that count in politics. And when they pall, the solution is to reject politics.
Lowe writes a fast if somewhat foul-mouthed prose and has a quick if somewhat prurient imagination. Those too are marks of a talented boy. But what we need is a political fiction — and a political reality — for adults.
Tom Lowe Spin
Pocket, 304 pp., $ 23
J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
