The Machiavellian Novelists
Allison, Wick
against the organized coercers. The movie is a defense of a century-old creed, unapologetic, hardnosed. It presents the case for the productive contract as against the contract to restrict...
...You just can't get cheap rusticity these days...
...Any reasonably intelligent person who knows that the author has to find a solution and present a happy ending can guess at the solution long before the author is willing to surmount the contrived obstacles he has placed in the reader's way...
...Despite it all, I'm still hooked on '._hem...
...Most of these writers don't have that much energy...
...VIEW, write: Dept...
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...It presents the case for the productive contract as against the contract to restrict production by violence...
...Although it is fashionable to proclaim that the novel is in terrible straits, the observant critic cannot be so sure...
...Some, such as the contemporary naturalism displayed so beautifully in Joyce Carol Oates's Them, have been critically noted and acclaimed...
...I suspect that he was testing to see if he could publish...
...The President's Plane Is Missing is harder, because it requires that the reader be able to guess how the author is going to trick him...
...He unxrked on the Scranton Commission and is presently a ]tee-lance writer, residing in Washington, D.C...
...Seven Days In May showed that the political novel was here to stay...
...Ardies depends on a few tricks, including a switch of look-alikes...
...4) Confront the teacher and demand he or she not support this racism...
...As we follow him through the various interlocking plots and counterplots we have to give him credit for momentarily baffling, then enlightening us-- but never to the point where we either give up or catch on...
...Hiroshima...
...That's easily explained: on the morning of August 6, 1945, an American reconnaissance plane flew over Hiroshima, noticed that an earthquake was oceuring, ordered an air strike which laid a magnesium burst over the city (like the glare of a thousand suns"), and, well, everybody thought an atom bomb had exploded...
...The political novel is not even a poor cousin to the novel-as-art-form, but it is a direct and profitable heir to the novel-as-popular-amusement...
...We can help by sending you info on schools near you where the right's already started and by marling out lit against Banfieki and his racist brothers and sisters...
...In the last thirty years we have seen only a few good novels emerge from the clutter of the best-seller lists, among them Ralph Ellisen's Invisible Man, Vladimir Nobkov's Lolita, and, perhaps, Saul Bellow's Mr...
...Ardies takes us from his hero's encounter with the candidate (a multimillionaire modelled on Dallas entrepreneur ,/ames Ling) through a series of adventures, misadventures and near-misses to a conclusion which leaves us with a glow of amazement...
...Which Droves that it can he done...
...Perhaps I value the President, the FBI and the CIA too highly...
...Needless to say, a plot is suspected...
...An English teacher of my acquaintance regards them generously as heavily plot-oriented...
...I was not able to do this, mainly because I do not like authors to trick me and I like to give them the benefit of the doubt when it looks like they are about to Seven Days In May stands headsand-shoulders above the others in this respect, because the reader is willing to follow the internal logic of the novel and to accept the results (However, one must accept the presumption that our military leaders would overthrow the government if they had half a chance...
...Q.E.D., Mario Puzo is an incurable insomniac...
...But we have also seen a considerable increase in the publication of novels of all types, mostly designed to appeal to the mass market and produce a goodly income for the author (is there no doubt that Jacqueline Suzann and Erich Segal are the dirty and clean sides of the same sheet...
...The characters are mere stick figures, the scenes are awkwardly handled, the research is poor and the knowledge of the actual workings of government is skeletal...
...When it is set off automatically it will explode, but when dropped from an aircraft or delivered on a missile it won't, a phenomenon which Edwin Corley's fictional scientists blame on an unknown attribute of the atom bomb, hence the title of the book...
...It makes you wonder how the rustics ever could afford it...
...E, 150 E, 35 Street, N. Y. 10016...
...In this case it is a sin I am willing to forgive because it is well-done...
...When it finally comes, don't be surprised if the demure little grandmother seated behind you shouts, "Lay in on them, Hankus !" What amuses me most, however, is the genuine, authentic, rustic- cabin which serves as the Stampers' dwelling...
...Ardies weaves his tale with a graceful style and a humorous insight...
...It says, in short, that collective coercion is not preferable to family solidarity and hard work...
...It is not forced...
...Others, operating under the imperative of Gresham's Law, have not been worth seriously bothering about...
...3) Put on guerilla skits in classes where it's used...
...2) Write letters to school papers exposing it...
...There's a lot of discussion in SDS about how to do this best...
...i of the June, 1972 Alternative...
...1971s: "sleeper" was Their Man in the White House, a first novel by a young Canadian named Tom Ardies...
...Tom Ardies has brought the Machiavellian novel one step closer to respectability by producing a decently balanced, original, plausible and well-written book that manages to hold the intended suspense to the very last sentence...
...Drink enough Cold Duck and you could invent such a plot...
...And the final scene is the most delightfully obscene film footage in recent years...
...Another scholar who has been an object of the SDS campaign is Richard J. Herrnstein, a 20 The Alternative June--September 1972...
...Henry Kissinger couldn't have done a better job of disproving every thesis on which this book rests...
...And sometimes, I am happy to report, my dreadful habit leads to a pleasant discovery...
...Second, the authors, having committed themselves to an absurd idea, depend Introduce Your Friends to The Alternative We have found that the best way to get subscribers is to give someone a sample copy of The Alternative, allow them to read it and then urge them to subscribe...
...Ever since Advise and Consent hit the top of the charts, the political novel has become a familiar addition to the obligatory offerings of our larger publishing houses...
...This might be an awkward confession, to admit allegiance to a .school of writing which one critically dismisses- However, I recently read Jacques Barzun's excellent study of the detective novel and decided to cast pretension aside...
...Perhaps the population explosion applies as much to fictional characters as it does to human beings...
...I'll also throw in Fail-Safe, although in that case the evil genius was a machine whose malfunction led to the accidental elimination of Moscow...
...The language is earthy in places, in the same way that the language in "Patton" is earthy...
...The novel as an art form, the novel as literature in the hristotelian sense, is in trouble, bat it always has been...
...The reasons why Mr...
...The incumbest president is worried because every announced candidate for the upcoming election has been assassinated...
...The Machiavellian novels have common characteristics, which is a euphemistic way of saying that they share common flaws...
...The third and most damaging accusation I can make against the Machiavellian novels is that they are so totally predictable...
...You see, the President didn't really die in the plane crash but nobody -- not even the Vice President -- can be told because it would blow the meeting...
...First, the story line is usually based on an improbable hypothesis...
...The founding father of this particular subspecies was Seven Days in May...
...5) Write us...
...Gary North Gary North is on the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education...
...The book holds its excitement for a while, until we discover that the...
...One suspects that the Writers Union has decreed that each had book will have at least one inept, superfluous and boring sex scene...
...Wick Allison Wick Allison graduated /tom the University of Texas in 1969...
...Advise and Consent represents the conflict class, in which the struggles and machinations involved in attaining higher public office are minutely described...
...In Vanished the action swings on the assumption that in order for a top presidential adviser to make a secret rendezvous with the Red Chinese he must publicly disappear into thin air, causing national consternation...
...Other examples: The Last Hurrah (which discloses the machinations involved in holding on to public office), The Election, The 4S0, The Image Makers, and the other Aller Dmry novels in the A&C series...
...I stayed up all night reading The Jesus Factor - - Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather...
...In The Jesus Factor the author makes his leading character a United States senator and presidential candidate who, by the merest coincidence, was a member of the task force which delivered the Bomb to Japan at the close of World War II...
...It fits in as well as the magnificent scenery does...
...To start with, the conspiracy novels are on the whole pretty bad books...
...During the same period, teder,~l expenditures tor health, education and w e l t a r e rose trom $5 billion to $85 billion (a rise of 1,346 percent...
...Yet new forms of fictional treatment are in constant development, regardless of their literary merit...
...Writers of Machiavellian novels have a long way to go before they can attain the level of competence demonstrated by their brothers in the conflict class, or by their cousins in the detective and spy genres...
...In recent years it has been followed by such attempts as Night at Camp David, Vanished, The President's Plane is Missing, The Jesus Factor, and recently, Their Man in The White House...
...That is their virtue and their sin...
...Neat, huh...
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...I Single Copy...
...Publishers and reviewers sometimes describe them as suspenseful but this is an opinion which is open to doubt...
...Both of these novels sold so well, received such publicity and were so original in concept that they may be considered, respectively, as archetypes of the two different kinds of political novels...
...Personally, I am a fanatical follower of the political novel...
...The novel revolves around a young ~riter who accepts an undercover CIA assignment to protect a soon-toannounce presidential candidate at his villa in Mexico...
...Likewise: Vanished asks the reader to believe that a presidential adviser can disappear on the ninth hole of the Burning Tree Golf Course without the President, the FBI or the CIA knowing or being able to discover what happened to him...
...At any rate, I am glad he made the decision, because he has provided aficionados of political fiction with that rarest of all rare gems, a decent book...
...That is, they all rate high on the entertainment scale and at the very bottom of every other scale...
...The main character and narrator of the story (sometimes the author steps in to narrate, just to confuse matters) is a presidential press secretary who is just as much in the dark as the reader...
...But before I start speaking in superlatives I must report that this book does not entirely avoid the pitfalls of the genre...
...The President's Plane is Missing begins with an interesting question: what would happen if Air Force One crashed in an uninhabitable and largely unreachable area...
...The senator, tlarougn a series of happy discoveries, draws from the fact mat his Bomb didn't work when dropped on Tokyo the conclusion that no atom bomb works (be gets helpful hints from the Prime Ministers of England, France and Israel...
...I haven't seen any evidence of such boldness in our military leadership...
...The second group, which intrigues me more, is the Machiavellian novel, in which a conspiracy is 'uncovered or unravelled or revealed, shocking us with the final relevation...
...The Jesus Factor, for example, is based on the idea that the atom bomb really doesn't work...
...Vanished and The Jesus Factor become transparent before the reader reaches the middle of the book...
...Just as I continue to puff my cigarettes with the full knowledge that each good gasp brings me a minute closer to the grave, so I continue to read each new political novel with a half-hearted acceptance that I will be smirking by the end of the second chapter...
...The authors fulfill this obligation religiously...
...Only the best storytellers can touch that thin line without crossing it...
...The sex, which is a good standard measuring device, is thrown about haphazardly, usually with little or no connection with the story...
...it is part of the culture of the lumber town in Oregon...
...It is a distinct genre within the general classification of the entertain-and-sell species...
...25 I | ren copies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $2.00 i |Twenty-five copies . . . . i . . . . . . . . . $4.00 I [Fifty, copies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $7.00 i |Name | Address I ! IBox m, Bloomington, Indiana 474;1 I I - - - - - - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ l The Alternative June--September 1972 19 on flimsy and implausible gimmicks to get off the hook...
...Not only are the plots unfounded, illogical, implausible and spiced with plenty of unacceptable trickery, but the writing is usually awful...
...When the entire book is based on a silly notion, the author must work hard to make it turn out to the reader's satisfaction...
...THUGS (continued from page 3) to accept widespread -- and increasing -- racist policies...
...Got it...
...Here are some ideas: 1) Start petition campaigns condemning the book or demanding it be thrown off campus...
...BETWEEN 1952 AND 1972 federal expenditures for national detense rose from $46 billion to $77 b i l l i o n ( a rise o t 66 percent...
...It cost well over $100,000 to build...
...While the plots are often mildly interesting, they are just as often idiotic...
...author has resorted to the gimmick of switching doubles (the president's cousin), so that the President can hold a top-secret summit conference with the Russians...
...Of the latter group, one relatively recent arrival on the fictional scene has been the political novel...
...the senator is a bit slow...
...Prejudices, First Series The Machiavellian Novelists I F THE AMERICAN novel is in immediate danger of extinction it may be a result of overproliferation...
...Ardies decided to employ his considerable talent on a Machiavellian novel are as mysterious as the best portions of this book...
...Spreading the antiracist movement and the fight to stop Banfield to every school where his book is used is a very serious question for the lives of millions...
Vol. 5 • June 1972 • No. 9
