Watergate: A Novel

Featured Guest Review: James Ellroy on Watergate

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed L.A. Quartet:  The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz.

I was thrilled, captivated, deeply moved and wholly subsumed by the world that Tom Mallon created. Washington D.C. from '72 to '74 circumscribes farce, tragedy, a reimagining of the political landscape and the reinstigation of grandeur into the fictional body politic. The book is fever dream, wolf whistle and history as plain and simple human longing; the book encapsulates no less than everything. I finished the last page and wept for an hour; I remain stunned 48 hours later. The laughter, the horror, the pathos, the tawdry drama of small people and their fatuous lusts and drives--ever falling short--but, somehow--achieving a transcendental interconnectedness. Watergate is certainly a masterpiece. More importantly, it is a concurrently credible and fantastic subversion of all our perceived notions of a smugly overreported event and an underscrutinized time and place. By casting Richard Nixon as heroic and as misunderstood as the man considered himself to be, Tom has reset the time-lock on every didactic and dismissive polemic and psych-bio ever written about our 37th president. Here, Nixon himself achieves grandeur; here, he will live as the embodiment of glorious intransigence and twisted courage.