Roll Call has a list of novels written by members of Congress, and the excerpts they present are, as one might expect, not amazing. Here’s an excerpt from Hawaii Governor and former Congressman Neal Abercrombie’s The Blood of Patriots (via):
“Oscar shattered the skull of Speaker Jim Purdy at the Republican leadership table and picked off Representative Barbara Laine next to him. Holding the monster pistol with both hands and moving it in a smooth sweep, he then quickly picked off the guards just inside each door of the gallery. He squeezed off each shot with dispatch, yet each was deliberate and well aimed. Not once did he break his lethal rhythm with a miss.”
It’s a running joke that politicians tend to do a poor job of writing fiction, and for the most part, the joke holds true. But I think there may be something more to this failure than just the fact that many of them are trained in legalese or that they’re busy. I think it has to do with the fact that being a politician requires putting the human capacity for empathy on hold, or at least minimizing it. It requires putting an idea or a philosophy or a party above people in order not to go mad.
Now, I’ve never been a Member of Congress. I’ve never been elected to anything. But I did live and breathe that world for three years as a staffer. And while I’m definitely still learning, I can definitely assure you that I’m a better writer now than I was when I had CNN blaring above my head eight hours a day. It took five years of reprogramming my mind to get to the point where I could write anything I could stand to read.
The thing is that the first question you’re trained to ask when you work in politics is, “Is this dangerous?” “Will this hurt my boss?” “Will this hurt the Party?” It took me two years to write a sex scene because I was afraid, even though I’d quit politics forever and had become a political nobody, that I would hurt the Congresswoman I’d worked for and the Democratic Party. Of course, I didn’t matter that much. But I thought I did.
In many of these works, I see the members overcorrecting, of taking risks so huge that they become ridiculous and are therefore not risks at all, like graphic depictions of two horses fucking (Barbara Boxer), or taking out an entire committee hearing (above). Or worse, they take no risks at all and write political propoganda (Peter King’s Vale of Tear’s.)
But this is all just a symptom of something much worse, of an inability to actually empathize with their characters. When I had even a little bit of power, and when people came to me night and day with the most horrendous stories imaginable, I had to learn how to shut off my capacity for empathy to avoid going mad. When I worked there, I had to learn how to say no, to not lose sleep over the veteran I just talked to who was missing half a head and would still not get enough disability. Or the fact that there was no way I could help that federal employee with cancer who was getting screwed out of her retirement on a technicality. I had to really believe that my political philosophy and my leaders would help fix all this in the end. I only had so much political capital to spend, and I had to pick and choose what to do not only morally but strategically. I not only had to do the right thing, but I had to get my boss reelected. I had to favor the businessman over the homeless man. Soon the people who came to see me became nothing more than ghosts to me, nothing more than nearly invisible categories who I either could help or couldn’t.
And I barely had any power.
It’s not a surprise that these members want to write a novel, to create a fictional world that supports their worldview, that shows how their philosophy can help change the world for the better despite all the terrible things that they are tacitly accepting. Like almost every writer, they want to justify their existence through their words. But for the most part, it appears that they are writing ghosts, or character outlines. The characters in these books are ideas, not people, and I can’t blame them for making this mistake. For a politician to relearn how to actually empathize with a character, and hence a person, the pain of the responsibility of their power would become unbearable.
4 responses
I wonder if there is a difference in style and quality if the novel was written before the writer commenced his or her political career or after? It seems that in the U.S., political skills and artistic ability don’t go hand in hand. Not so elsewhere–there is a long tradition of writers participating in politics in Latin America, and, of course, Léopold Senghor was a poet long before he became president of Senegal.
I’ve always wondered not why the novels of politicians are so bad, but why they write them at all? And not just elected people: Bill O’Reilly, Lynn Cheney — there’s something about being political that makes people want to write novels.
I think it’s that novels give you the power to remake the world according to your own imagined schema — good novels are not written by ideologues, but ideologues I think are particularly drawn to this format where you can propagate theories and philosophies without evidence or reason, but instead just (completely made up) example.
And I think you’re totally right that the BS shows through in their inability to get the things right that must be right even in made-up worlds: the people. You can write a novel in which money is farted from the asses of infants, but the way the characters think and act and speak in their circumstance has to make sense.
As you rightly say, that requires empathy, getting inside of people. And they don’t.
Years ago, I worked for a lobbying group for several months when I was fired after I point-blank asked my boss if she could justify drawing a salary when I heard her say that ‘these people are disgusting.’ From that moment on, I realize that the notion of empathy or truth were non-existent in the world of politics.
Great column. So many are trained as lawyers and assume that kind of facility with words is the same as being able to write well. Evidence to the contrary! The hubris often necessary to enter the field (I can fix it!) is apparently the same hubris that leads them not to seriously study the craft of writing (I can write it!).
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