The Columnist is full of B.S., intentionally (bgodday's Helping Hands write-off)
Written: Jul 31 '01
Product Rating:
Pros: The main character's unlikeability is captivating.
Cons: One finishes with a sense that much of the novel's potential isn't realized.
The Bottom Line: Gore Vidal compares Jeffrey Frank's The Columnist to the works of Evelyn Waugh. Vidal, Christopher Buckley and others call the book "hilarious." That's overstating it, but it is amusing.
eplovejoy's Full Review: Jeffrey Frank - The Columnist: A Novel
Jeffrey Frank's humor in The Columnist: A Novel is witty and dark. It could be described as acidic, if it is understood that the acid is diluted. Frank's story, told in the form of a biography written by his protagonist, is about a man who is mean to people, but without intending to be. It is not possible to like him, but hating him also is impossible.
Frank's central character, newspaper political columnist and television commentator Brandon Sladder (his initials are almost certainly not accidental), is a smug, keenly ambitious man whose self-absorption leaves him oblivious to his hurting every person with whom he comes into contact. He gets first his father and then his girlfriend fired because he uses in his reporting confidential information to which they had access. He skips a party given in his honor because he gets a better offer.
Sladder slips text into a newspaper without clearing it with his editor, who calls him a "sneaky bastard." He is more eager to spend time at State Department news briefings than at home with his pregnant wife. He carries in his wallet pictures of his kids only because other people expect them. And he describes a moment during an argument before his wife divorces him by observing, "She looked at me as if I were the stupid one."
But Frank leavens Sladder's odiousness with a kind of childish unawareness. Sladder doesn't intend to hurt anyone. If he were evil, he'd be a villain we could root against. But Sladder's callousness is accidental. He is often so deluded and pathetic that one feels an odd sympathy for him. He describes his own smile as "winning." He assures his readers that his sex drive is "unusually strong" and his "swollen parts" are "sizable." In trying to convince us, Sladder seems to be trying to convince himself as well. Sladder's neediness undercuts his villainy. It is difficult not to feel at least a little sorry for someone who recognizes that he has "lost something of immense value, but, with the illogic of a dream, ha[s] no idea what it was."
Sladder decides to write his memoir when the first President Bush encourages him to do so. George Bush the elder points out that Sladder knows many of the most significant political figures of the past several decades. And some of them do appear in Sladder's book. Edmund Muskie figures in a disastrous dinner that helps widen into chasms the cracks in Sladder's first marriage. And John F. Kennedy has a symbolic role in the background in much of Sladder's narrative. But this notion that Sladder is writing about others is one of Frank's jokes. Sladder's book ends up being about Sladder almost to the exclusion of all others. In this, the book-within-a-book neatly mirrors Sladder's life.
In the end, Sladder includes in his acknowledgements a hope that he and a woman with whom he once shared a fleeting romantic interest will be able to rekindle that spark, to "cross the moat of distance and to defeat the assault of time." But it is obvious to everyone but Sladder that she has moved on and hasn't looked back in decades. Sladder's delusions that their brief past might lead to a future again are touching. The reader is left understanding better than he does why he is alone. And stifling the urge the urge to tell him, "You did this to yourself, pal."
Much of the attention that reviewers and others have given to The Columnist has focused on its guessing-game aspects: Who could have inspired Frank's creation of the unpleasant Sladder? Much of the guessing surrounds George Will, with whom Sladder shares some biography and characteristics.
Both are political commentators whose writing led to prominent roles on national television talk shows. Both men love baseball and each includes in his writing sometimes strained references to the sport that suggest a bookish child trying to fit in with the cool kids. And Sladder writes speeches for a presidential hopeful and then praises those speeches publicly without revealing his authorship. That's reminiscent of the role that Will played for Ronald Reagan. Sladder even employs the justification that Will used when there was criticism of his behind-the-scenes involvement with a politician about whom he was writing: There is no conflict because different rules apply to columnists than to reporters.
But there are at least as many differences between Sladder and Will as there are similarities. One of the most obvious is their respective fates.
Will's column appears regularly in Newsweek and is syndicated internationally by the Washington Post Writers Group. He maintains a steady presence on ABC-TV's influential Sunday morning talk show This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. And he writes best-selling books, many of them about his beloved baseball.
Things work out far differently for Sladder. Without revealing any surprises, Sladder's end could be described in a sentence with the words "mighty" and "fallen." Apparently Frank believes in karma.
The emphasis on guessing who inspired Sladder needlessly takes from Frank the credit for creating so singular a character. It is likely that Frank has taken traits and bits of personalities from several of Washington's most prominent "talking heads." Will's career may have provided one of the elements, but Frank has made use of many others in his intriguing bit of alchemy. He has created a character who is both familiar and unlike anyone the reader is likely to know. Or want to know, except in the pages of an enjoyable book.
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For the second year, Epinions member bgoodday has organized a Helping Hands Write-Off. Participants donate the proceeds from their reviews to organizations that help make the world a better place.
The Web page for the write-off is at: http://63.200.217.166
Proceeds from this review will be donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists: http://www.cpj.org
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