I Need Something More Than Real

Primary Colors, for many reasons, is one of my touchstone novels.  But I've never been much for short stories, so it was with mixed feelings that I dived into the seven short stories about real political figures commissioned by New York this weekend.  I shouldn't have hesitated.  Some of them are very good.  I particularly liked "The Astral Plane Nail and Waxing Salon," by Mary Gaitskill, in which Ashley Dupre finds herself giving Silda Spitzer a pedicure in a curiously ethereal nail salon.  In particular, I liked the image of political wives and mistresses at peace with each other:

Monica finished with Hillary; they hung around at the door exchanging pleasantries. Hillary slipped Monica a tip, which Monica discreetly pocketed. 

I always felt a little bit bad for Monica Lewinsky, who appears to have built a reasonable life for herself.  She was never particularly the enemy: Bill was, of course.


Adam Haslett's piece on Obama is beautifully written, but inevitably melodramatic, and it steals its ending from The American President's meditation on collateral damage from aerial strikes, which is too bad.  I do like the man the President meets in the park, who strikes me as a plausible Washingtonian in his hobbies and occupation, if not in his end.  


The truth is, no author is ever going to get true public figures entirely right (and with Palin, the results are pathetically condescending).  You can't understand the whole mind of a character you don't create or control.  But fiction can illuminate a bit of these very public figures, and more tellingly, our hopes and fears about them.  When the prose is good, the result can be fun, too, as these stories are.