Allen Drury belongs on any list of conservative fiction writers. In today’s WSJ, he’s on a list of the best five novels about political conspiracy:
4. Advise and Consent
By Allen Drury
Doubleday, 1959
A generation of political junkies got hooked on the ways of Washington because of this book, published 50 years ago. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, “Advise and Consent” revealed the inner workings of the Senate—and offered compelling drama along the way. An ailing, manipulative, FDR-like president nominates as secretary of state an arrogant liberal intellectual and would-be Soviet appeaser, meant to evoke Alger Hiss. In the midst of his vicious confirmation battle, evidence emerges that he was once a member of a secret Communist cell. Allen Drury, who was a reporter in the New York Times’s Washington bureau, is not exactly subtle about his politics: All of his bad guys are soft on Communism. The capital he depicts is a period piece: Senators all orate like William Jennings Bryan; socialite hostesses have boozy salons where senators get sloppy; a hint in a newspaper column can destroy a politician’s career. But it’s addictive reading and arguably still the best novel about Washington politics.
For more on Drury, see this essay by Roger Kaplan.
Another book on the conspiriacy list intrigued me. I’ve heard about this book but have not read it. Now I’ll try to:
1. It Can’t Happen Here
By Sinclair Lewis
Doubleday, 1935
A charismatic Democratic senator who speaks in “noble but slippery abstractions” is elected president, in a groundswell of cultish adoration, by a nation on the brink of economic disaster. Promising to restore America’s greatness, he promptly announces a government seizure of the big banks and insurance companies. He strong-arms the Congress into amending the Constitution to give him unlimited emergency powers. He throws his enemies into concentration camps. With scarcely any resistance, the country has become a fascist dictatorship. No black helicopters here, though. Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian political satire, now largely forgotten except for its ironic title, was a mammoth best seller in 1935, during the depths of the Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. His president, Berzelius (“Buzz”) Windrip, is a ruthless phony with the “earthy sense of humor of a Mark Twain”; one of the few who dare oppose him openly is a rural newspaper editor who is forced to go on the run. Lewis’s prose could be ungainly, but he captured with caustic humor the bumptious narrow- mindedness of small-town life.