Reader's Advisory

I recently read two novels by Richard North Patterson. Took up the first one because I’d never read anything by him, and as he’s a fairly popular writer at my library (though not so wildly popular as the vastly inferior writer, James Patterson), I thought I should have some idea of what his books are like. This is one of the “tasks” of a public librarian: to be at least somewhat familiar with different authors, so that when a patron asks for suggestions of whom to read now that they’ve read everything by so and so, you have something to offer. It’s called Reader's Advisory.

My take is that Richard North Patterson has found a way to make money expounding on his views on various political and philosophical issues, without being a Fox News commentator. Both books I’ve read involve a great deal of talk. It’s usually interesting talk, real food for thought, but it’s talk. These books are referred to as "political thrillers,” but i don’t find anything particularly thrilling about them. I think of thrillers as involving bad guys from foreign powers who are crack shots or fanatical terrorists, being foiled by (often unwilling) John Wayne types from the U.S. Stakes are usually quite high, e.g., saving the world from nuclear holocaust, and there’s usually something of a body count. Nothing like that here. In The Race there is an incident of terrorism, but it’s barely a blip on the screen. Small scale (a hundred die, though it “could have been a thousand”), it occupies only a few paragraphs in the novel, and is used only to show the protagonist exhibiting leadership under stress.

Both of these books have to do with a U.S. political situation – in one case, the campaign to win the Republican party’s nomination for President (The Race); in the other, the “advise and consent” process of confirming a presidential nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (Protect and Serve). The tension in both books arises from in-fighting within the party, and the lengths to which one side proceeds to go to see that it wins.

The two books, published seven years apart, share many things; I’d go so far as to say too many things. In both there is a young, handsome, moderate Republican who’s politically savvy, but loaded with integrity. In The Race, he’s trying for the nomination, after having been a senator from Ohio; in Protect and Serve, he’s a senator from Ohio who hopes eventually to run for President. (I checked, and yes, Patterson grew up and went to college in Ohio. The other attributes he gives his heroes may owe something to the wish-fulfillment fiction writers are able to indulge in.) Both characters were air force pilots who were captured and tortured. In The Race the handsome, charismatic seeker of his party’s nomination is divorced and becomes involved with an impossibly beautiful black woman (and how realistic is that?); in Protect and Serve the (young, handsome, Democratic) President is also divorced, engaged to an impossibly beautiful woman who isn’t black, but did have an abortion once upon a time (a parallel plot line to the Chief Justice confirmation is a judicial challenge being brought by a young girl to a recently-enacted parental-consent law for late-term abortion). It would be interesting to know how many of these motifs appear in other Patterson novels.

Besides getting even-handed discussion of important issues, what’s perhaps most interesting about these books is their portrayal of Republicans who are moderate; who may personally object to abortion or same-sex marriages, but are not prepared to demonize homosexuals or women who get abortions (or doctors who perform them). There are characters who fit the stereotype of the unscrupulous Republican hypocrite – mouthing pieties while plotting all kinds of chicanery – but they are balanced by honest souls who are trying to do the right thing. Democrats figure virtually not at all in The Race; in Protect and Serve three major characters are Democrats, including the President and Vice President (who’s a woman :-) ), and they are portrayed as idealists who nonetheless know how the political game is played.

So there you go. I think I’ll read at least one more, to see if I get something entirely different. I admit that I hope so. Maybe a higher body count.