Wonkette: The Novel
Bachrach, Judy
Wonkette: The Novel A blogger's fictional debut is not exactly Anna Karenina. BY JUDY BACHRACH I had been wondering why Wonkette, a witchy website devoted to mocking Washington politics in...
...She also has the ears of a lynx...
...On the next, much the same calamity recurs: "All the air left her chest for an instant...
...Now, of course, I understand completely what went wrong...
...So, I'm really not sure about Ana Marie Cox anymore...
...There are times she can even forget about the ter-rycloth robes at four star hotels with their too-short sleeves...
...It will take five full paragraphs—and no ambulance in sight—before: "Air filled her lungs again...
...That the heroine shares our perplexity is no solace, believe me...
...Life is not all booze and beds and lousy polls...
...Her jaw hurt...
...To celebrate these assets she occasionally allows herself "a saucy toss of her head...
...Ana Marie Cox, the inspired wit behind Wonkette, was simply not concentrating...
...She was busy writing a novel...
...The heroine of Dog Days is named Melanie, or Mel, depending on the author's mood...
...But even then we are not out of the woods...
...Yes, there are moments of reprieve, even for Mel...
...And although the character's nominal job is that of a campaign worker for a Democratic candidate who resembles John Kerry in every particular ("Hillman did act like a robot sometimes"), right down Judy Bachrach is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair...
...This was ill-advised...
...Had this paragraph appeared—oh, anywhere within the first 100 pages of the novel, it might have provided straightaway the answers to a number of nagging literary questions...
...any website dragged into my personal Favorites column is practically guaranteed to turn into dross overnight...
...This is just the kind of writing that Wonkette used to skewer...
...Perhaps Wonkette should have written this novel...
...Never mind...
...Cox assures us, "the warmth ran jagged down her throat...
...A fine unmarried boyfriend...
...She knew which hotels in Washington would guarantee a noon check-in, what restaurants had separate entrances to the garage, and how many pairs of underwear she could fit into the side pocket in her purse intended for a cell phone...
...A victory for her candidate...
...Having an affair was like having a second job, Melanie thought, but the benefits made it worthwhile...
...I wasn't, mind you, wondering in a serious or methodical way...
...to his romp-resistant yellow dog "who was about as excited about the Hillman campaign as most voters were," in fact Melanie has, according to her creator, other abilities: She had learned the tricks of a covert carnal operator, and part of her was as proud of this new-found skill as she was of memorizing the names and faces of each senator before she came to town...
...Nor is the jagged course of that throat her only physical ailment...
...On one page, Melanie feels "a pressure on her chest like someone had tightened a belt around it...
...She, after all, has a boyfriend with a miracle wardrobe ("the buttons on his shirt fumbled loose") and magnetic hands that seek her "heavy breasts...
...And not only for her website...
...Such as: Why should we care where this person stashes her underwear...
...In fact, despite her youth and evident beauty, it's obvious she is a medical mess...
...Or if martinis are in short supply, then a slug of bourbon, from which, Ms...
...Her shoulders were tight...
...Within short order, "The buzzy high of her anger dissipated...
...But as it appears for no apparent reason within a hair's breadth of the last page, the reader is left slogging along through scores of room service moments and acres of Blackberry missives (these especially) without the faintest idea of what it is that Melanie wants...
...She at least has the consolation of downing around eight martinis per paragraph...
...For how else to explain her ability to listen in on conversations at the Four Seasons Hotel restaurant while standing miles away from the tables...
...She felt like she had been in a fist fight...
...Better relations with the press, whose egos and other delicate parts she is expected, as part of the "communications team," to stroke...
...Or maybe I am...
...BY JUDY BACHRACH I had been wondering why Wonkette, a witchy website devoted to mocking Washington politics in general, along with Washington Post columnist Tina Brown in particular, had grown so ghastly dull over the last months...
...Or: Hey, so that's why Kerry lost Ohio...
...But still, the dissolution of its charm, the subsiding of its frothy send-ups of stuffy old pols, left me perplexed and faintly broken-hearted...
Vol. 11 • February 2006 • No. 23
