A Feckless Young Man in Columbia

Mustard Man

Patriots by David Frum

The roman a clef is as Washingtonian as filler, botox and bitching. As Fox News conservative as blonde hair dye and microscopic skirts. As played out a genre as one could imagine, as now-ancient but quite good works like Primary Colors wait in the wings to tell us. As films like Wag the Dog insist – just as they insist upon themselves. This is a very important genre, they say – no doubt; we stand here ourselves to say that this genre is important. But we are also sprightly – we are also fun. We’re pucks and pixies. And it is our job to amuse you, no matter how much we would like our satire to be called ‘acid’ and ‘biting.’ It’s all in a spirit of fun.

Many people have decided to write books like this over the years. David Frum, the American writer, journalist and former speechwriter, is not a natural novelist. He says as much. Frum did not, he wrote and said in interviews, have drawers filled with old short stories before he decided to write Patriots. He had the first couple of paragraphs or two in his head, and suddenly decided that only satire would make his point for him.

This is a satirical novel about Washington in the Obama years, the Tea Party period before Donald Trump emerged and took over Frum’s public writings and much of the world’s news for the past decade.

This novel seems quaintly out of date in that light. It’s about senators who lie and cheat but who are not in prison for taking their bribes in gold bars; TV propaganda which is more Glenn Beck than Tucker. A world before the 2020 election. A world, too, before the slide into anarchy and cataclysm we now face in international relations.

But let us get to the point. Frum’s novel is a little too long, but this review need not be. It begins with a good first page.

‘I didn’t get the job through merit, my girlfriend said. But then, I didn't get my girlfriend through merit either.

‘I got her the way I get everything.

‘"What's your name?" she shouted over the party noise.

‘"Walter."

‘"Walter what?"

‘"Walter Schotzke."

‘"Like the mustard?"

‘"Yes, that's right."

‘"Kind of funny to be named after a mustard."

‘"The mustard's named after me."’

This is very funny.

Feckless mustard heir is told by his disappointed, ancient grandmother and his delictable but pushy girlfriend, Valerie, that he must go to DC – where true good is done – to better himself. Along the way, he receives a rushed and haphasard introduction to politics, meets many terrible characters – the vain, the evil, the purely self-interested, the rich beyond greed, rich beyond all morality types – and he must choose whether to do what is right or what he wants.

It’s a classic dilemma.

Much of the satire here is both very broad and also just about ‘in’ enough that someone who was not attuned to American political gossip a decade and a half ago will have not much success in sitting around and guessing who this or that person is meant to be. A whoremongering TV news executive is probably the late Roger Ailes, of Fox News fame. This or that rakish magazine proprietor really stretches the memory. This or that interchangeable bottle-blonde prostitute on ‘Patriot News,’ now you’re really taxing my ability to recall differences that were minute to begin with.

Some of the satire does not seem quite strong enough. The Patriot News stable being essentially a brothel of political and think-tank ‘talent,’ for instance. Is that really news, is it really funny?

Some of the scenes of banqueting and speechifying are funny. Frum is even occasionally prescient beyond his wildest dreams, such as when he satirisese the Tea Party of the Obama years and accidentally predicts the covid-era truckers’ protests which bedeviled former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Walter, the protagonist, is tempted. By illicit sex, by money, by fame. But he never quite buys in.

The book has a little pace to it. I read it in two days, which given its size, says something. The book tries to say something of its own: something about the value of public service. Something about the nobility of office. Something you read in resignation speeches and the newspapers every day of the week. Things Frum writes and says quite often, and in other forms quite well.

Parts of the novel are quite funny. This stuff falls flat.

Perhaps unexpectedly, then, is that where Frum’s novel fails is where it has a heart.