![]() ![]() ![]() Steve Erickson’s novel These Dreams of You will be published by Europa Editions in February. In impact on publication, as well as in legacy, none of his five sequels or fifteen other novels came close. Advise and Consent was Drury’s first book. He had a fine, lurid time with the gay subplot while shifting the philosophical center of gravity back toward the center, casting paragon Henry Fonda as the once idealistic, now repentant lefty secretary-designate. The sheer intrigue and storytelling of Advise and Consent survive the ideological intentions and also made for a wonderfully pulpy movie by Otto Preminger. More likely, it’s that I was riveted like the rest of the country by an author who knew of what he wrote after two decades as a reporter on Capitol Hill, and whose melodrama, gleaned entirely from congressional machinations, feels authentic with the turn of every page. When I first read it at age thirteen, this revisionism escaped me, maybe because I was raised in a home that worshipped Barry Goldwater, so the urgent anti-Communism seemed almost perfunctory. Allen Drury is a master of political fiction, 1 New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner, best known for the landmark novel Advise and Consent. ![]() In the novel, of course, it’s a left-wing senator who drives a decent rising young political star to a similar end for similar reasons. Shots are fired in Consent as well, albeit by a single senator to his own head, a narrative twist based on a real-life incident in the early ’50s involving a Democratic senator from Wyoming, who was pushed to commit suicide over his son’s homosexuality by associates of Joseph McCarthy. ![]()
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