Volume 45, Number 20 · December 17, 1998
Last Summer on the Vineyard
By Christopher Hitchens
The Gun Runner's Daughter
by Neil Gordon
Random House, 316 pp.
No Safe Place
by Richard North Patterson
Knopf, 497 pp., $25.95
Mackerel By Moonlight
by William F. Weld
Simon and Schuster, 238 pp., $23.00
So-called midstream fictions of international intrigue or of American politics—and of the filiations between them—have become almost as dependent as the movies themselves on certain formulae. There are no test-market audiences or focus groups for fiction (if one exempts Tom Wolfe's repeated trial runs in the pages of Rolling Stone), but those who compose and confect thrillers often write as if there were. Conventions are, if not iron, at the very least inelastic. And the effect upon style is almost inescapably a flattening and also a sentimentalizing one. When I had put down two out of these three offerings, I found that they hadn't contained a single adhesive or memorable line or passage. Nor had they exerted the least upward pressure on my sense of outrage or engagement. And the satirical or ironic element was absent altogether. Was this always so? It took gratifyingly little time to recall, and to locate, the following excerpts from those political classics which once aspired—as do the latest ones—to be a cut above the market for mere pulp:
Review, 3953 words
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