My only novel, Every Man a King (published in 1989), included a caricature of a famous political figure for whom I worked – and whom I might treat more kindly today, for as the years melt away so do the harsh judgments. As Babs Streisand sang, what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.
Judging by A.G. Doran’s new novel, Pale Dread, set in the State Department during the chaotic first Trump administration, its author has chosen to forget nothing of his sentence in our nation’s capital. The tipoff comes in the first paragraph, as he describes a typical inner-Beltway morning: “Over the bridges and through Washington’s streets flowed an implacid current of managerial serfs and sociopaths: smartly attired, carelessly overmedicated, animated by their legion anxieties.”
Don’t worry: this isn’t MAGA-approved fiction. Doran sets off charges in all directions in this rara avis of the book world: a genuinely witty Washington novel.
‘The Building’ – the State Department – is a sentient thing in this book, like Poe’s House of Usher
Doran, a fellow Upstate New York hick, hails from Hornell, the Maple City, though none dare call him syrupy. He is an army veteran, world traveler and foreign policy essayist whose three-year stint on the secretary’s policy planning staff in the Trump State Department left the wound upon which Pale Dread feasts.
The best Washington novels – Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire, Thomas Mallon’s fictions taking in everyone from Roscoe Conkling to George W. Bush – often interpret the passing scene through the gimlet eyes of perceptive subalterns. Pale Dread’s cicerone in Doran’s hellscape is Fitz, an “anarcho-medievalist” naif who serves the republic by writing “seldom-read memoranda on grand strategy and pin[ing] for the end of days.” His innocence, alas, is no shield against a Deep State and its shallow State Department servitors.
“The Building” – the State Department, that is – is a sentient thing in this book, rather like Poe’s House of Usher, though instead of ghostly neurasthenics it is “a reliquary of ossified Anglo-Protestantism.” Of the Catholics and Jews tolerated within its walls, Doran writes, “The Building had embraced desegregation with all the enthusiasm of Boston sports fans.”
Fitz’s shrewish wife, an FBI agent who plots his downfall as she cuckolds him, makes him feel “the sensory detachment of a captured Tlaxcalan warrior as an Aztec priest opened his chest cavity to feast on the spiritual nutrients therein.” Her place of work is even bleaker than Fitz’s: “The J. Edgar Hoover Building rose from Pennsylvania Avenue like the cankerous growth of a loathsome social disease, a concrete pustule on the upper lip of the Republic. It had been conceived in some unspeakable act of architectural sin and was named after the cross-dressing tyrant who founded that curiously esteemed agency: the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Among the book’s pleasures is Doran’s lapidary skill as a minter of aphorisms and similes. For instance: “Puns, like nuclear weapons, can’t be unmade but should never be used” and, “Their conjugal relationship, mildly vigorous for the first few weeks of marriage, deteriorated with the speed of an Arab national army.”
As to the plot, it concerns three disaffected drones of diplomacy: Fitz; a dissipated gay Latin Mass Catholic named Buckburn (yes, Doran loves Waugh); and Naomi, a spitfire enchantress who says of the State Department, “It’s like they remove every guy’s balls when he walks into this fucking place every day.” The trio conspire in republic-saving mischief at Buckburn’s Gothic club, last of DC’s “molly houses.” It takes the clueless Fitz a while to wise up to the vibe; he even misses the heavy-handed hint that the only presidential portrait hanging from its walls is one of a “nearly winsome James Buchanan.” Buckburn is a wonderfully arch creation who mourns, “They murdered everything that was good and beautiful and erotic about the homosexual subculture by making us like them… When they look at me they don’t see me at all. They see their own moral superiority.”
After listening to “elderly white people befouling the spirituals” in the National Cathedral, he hisses to Fitz, “If I had a suicide vest on I’d end this horror.” And to Fitz’s sententious “Let the dead bury the dead,” Buckburn responds, “I was always curious how that worked exactly.” (Me too!)
A good friend once asked me if a character in my novel, a figure of gentle (I hope) mockery, had been based on him. Of course it was. And of course I denied it. Hey, art is life transmuted. Doran tells me that the real-life Naomi loves her depiction, as one might expect from a woman whose fictive doppelgänger is described as “mesmerizing” and “stunning.” He says there is no Buckburn, but if there is, invite him to your next party. He’s an Alice Roosevelt Longworth-level dispenser of malice.
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