In ‘Landfall,’ an imagined Bush administration faces its follies

Book review

Thomas Mallon is a jack of all trades. He’s written literary criticism, a study of plagiarism and a biographical account of a suburban Dallas housewife who befriended Lee Harvey Oswald and his family before John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But he’s known best for historical fiction that places peripheral or imaginary characters amid headline-grabbing events. His 1994 breakout novel, “Henry and Clara,” followed real-life couple Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris after they shared the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre the night Abraham Lincoln was killed. “Watergate” witheringly tackled Richard Nixon’s scandalous final two years in office, staying tightly confined to the beleaguered president and his administration. “Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years” did something similar.

Now comes “Landfall,” in which Mallon focuses on two disasters from George W. Bush’s presidency: the lethally fumbled response to Hurricane Katrina, and equally messy handling of the war in Iraq. “Landfall” is a big, minutiae-crammed novel, driven by the ambivalence and agonies of its main characters and leavened with the catty wit of its supporting cast. (Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and former Texas Gov. Ann Richards steal all the scenes they’re in, as a calm Laura Bush mediates between them with near-Machiavellian canniness.)

At the novel’s heart are two fictional characters, Ross Weatherall and Allie O’Connor, who briefly met as teenagers at a beery “Bush Bash” in Lubbock, Texas, in 1978. Something fishy about that congressional campaign fundraiser for George W. Bush (in a race he wound up losing) offers a minor mystery to be solved decades later.

But the central action begins in 2005, when Ross is working on a project for the National Endowment of the Arts and Humanities in New Orleans and Allie is serving with the National Security Council, monitoring Iraq’s efforts to conduct its first legitimate elections. When we meet him, the adult Ross is on board with the Bush agenda, while Allie is skeptical about the American presence in Iraq. Events will conspire to switch their views on these matters. In the meantime, Bush himself, through a series of coincidences, acts as an unlikely Cupid to this on-again-off-again couple.

Big-name officials — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice — are also present. A host of minor players (the novel comes equipped with a five-page “Cast of Characters” to help you keep them straight) figure in, too. While some of these walk-on appearances feel a bit perfunctory, Henry Kissinger delivers a nice zinger when he tells Cheney, “You’ve already lost the battle for public opinion. You now need only to worry about losing the war.”

Rice and Bush get the most imaginative treatment. Mallon’s Bush has an irascible charm and an unexpectedly keen awareness that his administration has fallen short, while Mallon’s Rice sometimes wishes herself out of the game altogether. “What relief there would be,” she thinks, “in representing a midlevel country — or in being a midlevel person!” Her mix of uncertainty and wiliness is arresting, even if some liberties Mallon takes with her love life and realpolitik maneuvers (with Laura Bush as her ally) feel over-the-top.

Still, it’s the characters’ experiences in Baghdad and New Orleans during Katrina that anchor the book. As for the secrets behind that long-ago “Bush Bash” in Lubbock, they tenuously — yet tenaciously — connect the far-flung precincts of the novel.

The flow of Mallon’s prose is sometimes tripped up by clumsy but necessary forays into who’s who and what’s what (a glossary of government-agency acronyms would help). But even in moments that start off feeling over-explanatory, closing phrases deliver genuine, shocking twists, especially where Allie is concerned. “Doing the right thing for the wrong reason,” she discloses midway through the novel, “has begun to speak to me.”

Mallon’s slippery take on the Bush era may speak to readers, too.

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“Landfall” by Thomas Mallon, Pantheon, 469 pp., $28.95