Crooked

May 4, 2015
Richard Nixon, the narrator of this audacious genre-bending novel from Grossman (You), purports to tell the “real story of Watergate.” In a voice that sounds authentically Nixonian, the disgraced 37th president reminisces about most of the important people from his past, including his wife, Pat (“beautiful and intelligent” but “also odd”); his opponent in the 1960 presidential race, John F. Kennedy (“Kennedy smiled at me with his irresistible grin and even in that moment I felt drawn to him”); and Henry Kissinger (whose “singsong accent seemed borrowed from a German burlesque show”). The political autobiography turns into a Cold War spy caper, and then into a series of supernatural adventures bordering on Lovecraftian horror. (“The hole in the wall was expanding, slowly. Beyond I saw stars and a bulky shape silhouetted against them.”) The implied climactic cataclysm doesn’t quite come off, but otherwise Grossman has done a fine job of combining history, thriller, and weird tale. Agent: Luke Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit.

May 15, 2015
Henry Kissinger, dark lord of the universe? If you're a student of the late Christopher Hitchens or William Shawcross, the idea won't seem far-fetched. Grossman (You, 2013, etc.) takes it into fictional realms with this oddball book, which opens with none other than "Tricky" Dick Nixon giving a long soliloquy of a confession: "I outlived the hippies," he says, "I outlived Elvis and Marlene Dietrich and the Soviet Union itself. It's been twenty years since I was forced to stage my own death." Say what? A stake doesn't hold his heart to the Yorba Linda soil? Nope, for the eternal Nixon, bearing an eldritch tattoo administered by Henry the K and full of secrets and lies, isn't the only evil being in the piece; indeed, after a fashion, as "the last of the American sorcerer-presidents," he's been helping save the world from all manner of mischief that plays out under the general rubric of the Cold War, giving new meaning to the phrase "Evil Empire." It takes Grossman, who's apparently been reading up on his H.P. Lovecraft, a while to fill this saggy balloon with enough gas to give it loft, and there's way too much talk and way too little action, unless you count Pat Nixon's discussion of her voting record as action. A sometimes-confusing timeline doesn't help matters. Still, and even if the story is an inconsequential confection in the end, it's pleasing to allow Nixon, who revisits his checkered career throughout Grossman's pages, supernatural leeway in explaining how he could have betrayed the public trust so badly-and pleasing to imagine, with Grossman, that he wasn't really talking about football with those protestors at the Lincoln Memorial on that cold night all those years ago. And as for conspiracy theory? Well, let Kissinger take you down the miles and miles of secret corridors at the Pentagon-not the 17 miles that we know of but the places underground where the nukes live, ready to put an end to the world way back in our bicentennial year, "the final one of the American Republic." A worthy pop-cult amusement, if sometimes reading like cutting-room-floor Stephen King mixed up with a little Boris and Natasha.

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Starred review from April 15, 2015

In Grossman's ingenious latest (after Soon I Will Be Invincible and You), sad-sack Richard Nixon slanders and lies his way into the House of Representatives, consorts with Soviet spies to achieve national prominence, hobnobs with the wizard Henry Kissinger to obtain the presidency, and through it all remains unable to win the approval of his wife, let alone the American people. It seems the Cold War has a dimension hidden from most observers: a supernatural battle of occult forces pitting the magic of the Oval Office and the sorcerer-like powers of Dwight Eisenhower against dark forces abroad. Perhaps it's a tribute to the inexplicability of Nixon's real career and many comebacks, but Grossman succeeds in making his fantastic explanation seem more believable than the truth. VERDICT This novel works as gleeful satire, as wacky alternate history, and as thriller, but what really shines is the character study at its center. Nixon's self-loathing, longing for appreciation, and inability to please his beloved motivate every moment perfectly, ultimately creating a narrator who is pathetic, yet at the same time sympathetic. [See Prepub Alert, 2/2/15.]--Neil Hollands, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA

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