Washington Post Book Reviews
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Saturday December 4, 2010
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REVIVAL: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House
Richard Wolffe
Crown
ISBN 978-0307717412
312 pages
$26
Reviewed by Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, is a partner at West Wing Writers and is the author of "Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court"
If the word "revival" has been associated with anyone this year, it is the Republican Party, which has raised itself from the dead, or the tearful televangelist Glenn Beck, who led an old-fashioned camp meeting on the Mall in August. The president of the United States would not seem to have an especially strong claim.
Which gives Richard Wolffe's new book -- or, at least, its title -- a counterintuitive quality. In "Revival," Wolffe, a cable news commentator and veteran journalist, zeroes in on the first few months of 2010, a brief but, he contends, "defining period" in which President Obama "was forced to re-examine himself and his team" and emerged wiser and stronger. Wolffe's central piece of evidence is the improbable passage of health-care reform, thanks largely to the president's constancy and grit. Progress in other areas -- the economy, especially -- was more incremental, as Wolffe recounts.
This is, of course, as recent as recent history gets. At such a short distance, what -- beyond a premature nostalgia for Democratic control of the House -- would prompt today's reader to revisit, say, the Stupak amendment and its undoing? An eagerness for two things, most likely: new details and deeper insights. Indeed, the publicity campaign on behalf of "Revival" promises both; a pre-publication embargo, dictating precise terms for handling the book, implies that its contents are highly combustible. It is therefore disappointing to find that Wolffe's account adds little to our understanding of these events or, more importantly, what they portend for Obama's (and our) future.
The book does, however, provide a window into the West Wing. Since the early days of the presidential campaign -- the subject of Wolffe's previous book, "Renegade" -- Obama and his advisers have offered Wolffe unrivaled access. "Revival," as a result, is full of fairly candid chatter, some of it self-critical, some of it self-pitying and some (if not much) of it unflattering to the boss. "He reads everything," one Obama aide complains. "And I mean everything. Every news story, every column. It's driving everyone crazy."
Wolffe reconstructs Oval Office meetings in the manner of Bob Woodward; presents the spectacle of senior advisers engaged in armchair psychoanalysis of other senior advisers (Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers are most often on the couch); and dishes up the kind of vicious tidbits on which bloggers swarm and feast (before moving on, ever hungry). For example, Wolffe reports that during the negotiations over the health-care bill, "Speaker Pelosi was so volcanic that much of the White House strategy was shaped in terms of how to deal with her."
The fruits of his access aside, the bulk of Wolffe's book seems cobbled together from press reports. Unlike "Renegade," which can stake a claim to indispensability, "Revival" feels like supplemental reading, a slight addition to a shelf that contains Jonathan Alter's authoritative account of Obama's first year in office, "The Promise," and Woodward's crisp portrait of the commander in chief, "Obama's Wars."
Compared to these two, Wolffe's book seems less certain of its premise. "This was the season of (Obama's) revival," Wolffe declares, but fails to convince. Beyond the historic victory on health care, arguably unparalleled in the modern presidency, Wolffe is at pains to find signs of political renewal. None of his examples -- the creation of the bipartisan commission on fiscal responsibility, a rapid response to the earthquake in Haiti, a sharp retort to attacks by former Vice President Richard Cheney -- looks much like an inflection point. Wolffe cites a "tangible turnaround in the political faith of supporters," but Gallup, at the time, saw no such thing. Throughout this period, the president's approval rating hovered right around 50 percent, showing resilience, but hardly resurgence. Wolffe is closer to the mark when he writes that Obama, by the spring, "had stumbled HIS WAY through the wasteland."
Through one, perhaps, and into another. The eight months since the signing of the health-care law have featured an oil spill in the Gulf, a spasm of right-wing reaction across the country, an unemployment rate that refuses to budge, a relentless enemy in Afghanistan, a midterm "shellacking" and a vow by the soon-to-be chairman of the House government oversight committee to investigate a "corrupt" administration around the clock. If this has not gone on quite long enough to count as an annus horribilis, it has been horribilis enough, and it's not over yet.
So let the new season of Obama's revival begin without delay, and let him show the same persistence, pragmatism and audacity it took to pass the health-care bill. Whatever it might say on the clock in the Oval Office, this is not halftime; this is the fourth quarter, and it is again time for this "fourth-quarter player," as Wolffe and others describe him, to show the nation his game.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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CRAZY William Peter Blatty
Forge
ISBN 978-0765326492
188 pages
$22.99
Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand
It's hard to believe, but local horror meister William Peter Blatty once had a booming career as a funny guy. In addition to his comic novels, he worked with Blake Edwards on several films, including "A Shot in the Dark," the second Inspector Clouseau movie; he loved P.G. Wodehouse; and he was even compared to S.J. Perelman. All this came before those looming steps in Georgetown forever linked Blatty with his best-known work, "The Exorcist" (1971).
Which makes his new novel, "Crazy," a return to form. It's a sweet-natured, often hilarious tale cast as the memoirs of an 82-year-old former screenwriter named Joey El Bueno. Joey's writing from a 10th-floor room at Bellevue Hospital, where the usually suspicious Nurse Bloor doesn't raise an eyebrow at his laptop because "she has read Archy and Mehitabel and knows that sometimes even a rat can type."
Joey is the son of an Irish beauty who died giving birth to him and an impoverished Peruvian immigrant who made his living pushing a hot dog cart. Joey's memoir takes us back to the year he was a seventh-grader at St. Stephen's, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, in 1941. That's where he first meets Jane Bent, a street-smart, foul-mouthed transfer student from Our Lady of Sorrows. At first, Joey finds her "nuttier than a truckload of filberts," but that changes when Jane flashes a $5 bill and suggests an afternoon at the movies.
Many hours and three screenings of "Gunga Din" later, the two seem to have become an inseparable pair. Then they part, and Joey never sees her again. Not that Jane, anyway.
I won't say more lest I spoil the pleasures of this lovely, time-shifting novel, which evokes a lost New York complete with a school excursion to Coney Island and side trips to "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." It's like a classic Jean Shepherd anecdote with supernatural overtones. Blatty also cites Ray Bradbury and Robert Nathan as influences, and "Crazy" more than once invokes Kurt Vonnegut. Joey's memoir favors run-on sentences with a comedic payoff: "There was a breeze and these jillions of gulls all circling and squawking forlornly but with great agitation and high excitement as if they were in factions that were blaming one another for the loss of some unspoiled world, some paradise where every automobile was a convertible and where hats and awnings did not exist."
Blatty has always been upfront about his Catholic faith. The opening of "The Exorcist" evokes "Lucifer upward-groping back to his God," and Crazy's poignant final pages make clear that, rather than an exercise in nostalgia, this novel is a reminder of Saint Paul's command, "While we have time, let us do good." Or, as Joey puts it, "What would Kurt Vonnegut do?"
Elizabeth Hand's most recent novel is "Illyria."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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