‘Finale,’ by Thomas Mallon
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Faces of an era. Credit Photographs: center, Ronald Reagan, by Dirck Halstead/The LIFE
Images Collection — Getty Images. Clockwise from upper right: Nancy Reagan, by
George Tames/The New York Times; William F. Buckley Jr., by Ron
Galella/WireImage; Merv Griffin, by Bob Riha Jr./WireImage; Christopher
Hitchens, by Catherine Karnow/Corbis; John Hinckley Jr., from associated Press;
Joan Quigley, by Tony Korody/The LIFE Images Collection — Getty Images
Readers of “Finale,” Thomas Mallon’s sly and
penetrating ninth novel, are well aware that the book’s protagonist, the
nation’s 40th president, is destined to be revered as the Republican Party’s
patron saint, his very name synonymous with conservative virtue. However, none
of the novel’s characters know this in real time. “Finale” takes place
primarily in 1986, two years after Ronald Reagan’s final triumphant campaign
and two years before he vacates the White House for good. His presidential
legacy is on the line, and the events of 1986 — a fateful nuclear arms meeting
in Reykjavik with Mikhail Gorbachev and the brewing Iran-contra scandal —
threaten to undo it. The sense of foreboding, bordering at times on panic, that
pervades this work of historical fiction stands as an arresting contrast to
today’s notion of the unassailable Teflon president.
Mallon is a poised storyteller who traffics in
history’s ironic creases. His novels don’t upend conventional wisdom so much as
remind us that history is a rickety architecture of human endeavor — that
today’s statues commemorate yesterday’s frail and fumbling mortals. Less
capable practitioners of historical fiction are often all too eager to
demonstrate their archival mastery of the era in question. Mallon’s novels, in
contrast, never come off as feats of plodding research. A resident of Washington,
D.C., Mallon gravitates naturally toward political melodrama, from Lincoln’s
assassination to McCarthyism to Watergate. Compared with these searing
episodes, the waning years of the Reagan presidency would seem to constitute
rather banal fare. It’s perhaps for this reason that “Finale” represents
Mallon’s most audacious and important work yet.
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Reagan’s greatness, or even his competence,
remained at best an open issue in 1986. The Gipper’s unflappability throughout
this tempestuous year is a disconcerting phenomenon that Mallon plays for
maximum effect. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Edmund Morris underwent
a meltdown in attempting to understand Reagan, to whom he had been given
extraordinary access. (Devilishly, Mallon provides a scene in which poor Morris
struggles in vain to tease a reflective comment from his politely apathetic
subject.) The author’s decision here — disappointing, perhaps, to those who
would like the whole matter cleared up — is to make a virtue out of Reagan’s
opacity. In a sense, “Finale” is a mystery novel. Is the principal character,
as one observer in the book puts it, an idiot or an idiot savant? Mallon all
but dares us to consider him to be the former. In one scene, the president sits
among a Hollywood posse that includes Merv Griffin and Eva Gabor and doodles on
a menu card. In another, an exasperated character who has just spoken to the
president on the phone recalls that he “spent more time talking about the
squirrel on his windowsill” than about a pressing matter at hand.
Mallon’s Reagan — described by the president of
Iceland as “the most deeply shallow man she’d ever met” — is both omnipresent
in and virtually absent from “Finale.” Other than the book’s climactic dialogue
between the president and Gorbachev in Reykjavik, the Great Communicator’s
silky voice is seldom heard, except literally in the background — on TV, in a
convention hall — on a ceaseless ’80s soundtrack that’s more elemental than
human. Still, in mystery there’s power. In the pivotal showdown, Gorbachev is
kept off balance by his adversary — or, as Mallon puts it, “Gorbachev didn’t
know what to make of the sweetness that suffused Reagan’s stubbornness.” At the
conclusion of one of their talks, the president shakes the Russian’s hand and
then presses into his palm a list of Soviet dissidents seeking to leave the
motherland — throwing him back on his heels one more time.
The Reagan conundrum is one Mallon’s characters
all wrestle with. That’s the case even with Nancy Reagan, depicted here as
shallow and vindictive but also desperately alone with her fears of all that
could go wrong with “Ronnie’s” presidency. In the opening chapter, she’s
staring adoringly at her orating spouse — “the Gaze” — while a cascade of
doubts and grievances rumbles beneath her radiant expression. (“People wondered
how she never appeared bored listening to the same speech for the 50th time,”
Mallon writes. “It was simple: She never listened to it.”) The nightmare of her
husband’s near assassination is ever looming: “Five years later, every slammed
door or dropped fork still sounded like a shot.” But what stays with her most
is the horrific recognition that her actor husband’s performance could fall
apart at any minute. Egged on by her astrologer, Joan Quigley, Nancy Reagan
spends much of 1986 scheming to find a way for her husband to gracefully resign
before the end of the year. In marked contrast to Ronnie, his wife is all too
aware of her neuroses; as she tells one of her aides, “Overreacting is what I
do.” Mallon’s portrayal of the first lady is humane, thoroughly convincing and
counts as one of the book’s triumphs.
So is his presentation of Richard Nixon, with
whom “Finale” opens, rather unexpectedly. Mallon had considerable sport with
the disgraced president in his previous novel, “Watergate.” But the Nixon of
1986 is strangely likable: unfailingly observant, crassly funny, more
philosophical than self-pitying and, as it turns out, the novel’s most reliable
narrator. He alone recognizes, when Reagan steps aside as Gerald Ford’s
challenger in 1976, that the defeated politician “was heading not for a pasture
but a short stretch of wilderness, on the other side of which lay something
vast.” And it’s Nixon, Mallon hints in a remarkable plot twist, who quite
possibly ended the Cold War by faxing Reagan a note of exquisite advice. But of
Reagan, writes Mallon, even the all-knowing ex-president “realized yet again that
he didn’t understand this guy in the least.”
As in his previous novels, Mallon works deftly
with an ensemble cast, employing both real-life and fictitious characters, with
the effect that his portrait of the Reagan years is rendered as a beguiling
collage. His characters are relentlessly witty (sometimes dubiously so, but
that’s preferable to a slate of dullards) and are often deployed as cameos just
for the comic hell of it — as in the case of Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s
attractive assistant, and the acid-tongued conservative journalist William F.
Buckley Jr.
Mallon sends up the notables of the 1980s with
brilliant if bitchy aplomb — describing, for example, the United Nations
ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick as “a caricaturist’s dream, handsome and
villainous, her butchness somehow deeply feminine” and calling our attention to
Jackie Kennedy’s “huge smile so unfortunately compromised by her smoker’s
teeth.” Some of the vignettes are more effective than others. Mallon places a
catty dialogue between Bette Davis and Ann Sothern about their former B-actor
colleague “Little Ronnie Reagan” just after the breakdown of the Reykjavik
talks — a brilliant authorial play that renders Reagan as an affable failure
whose talentlessness has at last done him in. A few other characters, like
Jimmy Carter and Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley, seem like
superfluous inclusions, mainly because Mallon doesn’t inhabit their psyches and
thereby reveal them as something beyond what we already know from yesteryear’s
newspapers.
The novel’s one flaw lies in Mallon’s
sentimental treatment of his close friend, Christopher Hitchens, who died in
2011. In “Finale,” Hitch (as his associates knew him) is a rascally
journalistic amalgam of James Bond, Bob Woodward and Oscar Wilde. Power brokers
and national security experts submit meekly to his demands for an interview;
female sources are eager to sleep with him; the great and haughty Margaret
Thatcher finds herself quoting a Hitchens snippet back to him. His ability to
get the better of every situation may or may not have been true in real life.
But in this world of fictionally textured reality, he’s something of a
caricature, the only hitch in an otherwise galloping narrative.
FINALE
A Novel of the
Reagan Years
By Thomas Mallon
462 pp. Pantheon
Books. $27.95.
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
He is currently working on a book about race and murder in Washington, D.C.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/books/review/finale-thomas-mallon-novel-about-ronald-reagan-review.html
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