This is a follow-up to my post Sunday, The Novel-Writing Class.

The coming confirmation battles over the nomination of Strip-search Sammy Alito to the Supreme Court will make a great story.

Look at the cast of characters. A weakened, frustrated, angry and from all accounts increasingly unfocused President. His desperate, conniving Vice-President. His even more desperate and conniving Right Hand Man. A weepy, emotionally unstable Senate Majority Leader cracking under the strain of his own financial scandals. The aging, humiliated once too often chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee forced to choose yet again between standing up for his avowed principles or caving in to the bullying of his Right Wing colleagues. The seemingly mild-mannered Minority Leader who is cagey as all get out and solid steel.

And what a plot!

Will the supposedly pro-choice Republicans stick with the President on this one? Will the Democrats find the courage to stand up with their cagey, steely Leader? Will they filibuster? Will the Majority Leader go nuclear? Will the “compromise” hold? Will they blow up the Senate?

And, in the background, quietly, inexorably, Patrick Fitzgerald grimly prepares to bring Scooter Libby to trial and the whole lying gang into court to testify about how they ginned up a war and set out to cover up their evil schemes.

It would make a great novel, and almost certainly such a great novel will never be written.

Not a “serious” novel, anyway. Not a novel that highbrow critics, college professors, and the clerks stocking the shelves at Barnes and Noble would classify as “literature,” anyway.

The genre writers might have a go at it. There could be mysteries, thrillers, satires, and even romances written. Scooter Libby himself might write one.

But the serious novelists, the charter members of the Novel-writing class will ignore it as material for their fiction, although I have no doubt many will weigh in with op-ed pieces, just as they ignored Watergate, Iran Contra, and the Impeachment Crisis.

Most members of the Novel-writing Class are blinded to Politics by convention, workshop training, market demands, and class prejudices. To start with the last—the Novel-writing Class likes to write about characters who do a lot of creative thinking, characters who read poetry and philosophy and novels, characters who tend to think like what they read, poetically, philosophically, and imagistically. In short, they like to write about novelists or, at least, other artists and intellectuals. They also write what they know, and they don’t know Washington, their state capitals, or even the town hall. Members of the Novel-writing class and the Political Class don’t mix.

In addition, since almost every member of the Novel-writing class holds an MFA in Creative Writing or teaches in a creative writing program, and since creative writing programs make a religion of short story writing, the Novel Writing class tends to write, if not always short, then up close and narrowly focused stories that take place on intimate stages with a very limited cast of characters. Put a single United States Senator on stage and you’ve immediately added to your story twenty-seven supporting characters—aides, lobbyists, constituents, political allies and opponents.

And the Novel-writing Class has been trained to be plot-averse. Not so much because they don’t know how or like to tell stories, but because they are afraid of losing control and having their characters and themes swallowed up in melodrama.

Politics is all plot. It is in fact, as much as it is anything, the Art of Plotting. (Some call it planning, others call it scheming.) Change the names and re-tell the stories of Watergate, Iran-Contra, Bill and Monica, the Plame Affair and they will all sound like plots for hackneyed melodramas.

If you gave a member of the Novel-writing Class a six figure advance and sent him out to write a novel about a President who risks Impeachment to have an affair with a voluptuous intern, the novel you’d get back would almost certainly be set in a bedroom in a cabin at Camp David and tell the story of a single morning in the course of the affair when the President and the intern are able to be alone together, finally, and in between poetically evoked romps of Updikian sex, they talk and talk and talk, about their childhoods, their families, and the last books they read. Possibly, from time to time, the President lectures the intern on “Politics” and delivers a speech that sounds suspiciously as if it was something the novelist originally wrote for the op-ed section of the New York Times. At the end, either the President or the Intern has an “epiphany” that saddens them but leaves them wiser about themselves and the human condition, at which point a Secret Service agent knocks at the bedroom door and the novel ends on the bittersweet note that’s as close as contemporary novels come to tragic.

So we’re probably lucky that the likes of Rick Moody, Richard Ford, etc. steer clear of Politics. Most of us live our lives on small stages, our great personal dramas are intimate, small scale, and domestic. Novels that deal with what is most important to all of us, including Politicians, are important. Which is the greater novel? War and Peace or Anna Karenina?

Besides which, while we do need Literature to explain ourselves to ourselves, we don’t need novels to explain that part of ourselves that is caught up in the Political. We have literature that is devoted to doing just that; we’re just not used to thinking of biographies and histories and some of the great works of journalism as literature.

We being contemporary Americans. People of intellectual and artistic bents who came before us had no problem with it. In fact, some of them had trouble thinking of novels as literature.

In his essay Why Americans can’t write political fiction, Christopher Lehmann presents Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place as an example of the kind of political novel he’d like to see more of. Brammer’s main character, Arthur Fenstemaker, is modeled on Lyndon Johnson and Lehmann thinks that The Gay Place captures both the cyncial charm of Johnson and the raucous, exhuberant amorality of Texas politics in Johnson’s time. It sounds like a book I might like. But will it tell me anything I don’t know and didn’t enjoy learning more from the first two volumes of Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ?

And while a novel about Bill and Monica might be written that’s more lively and expansive than the one I imagined above, I’ve already read Jeffrey Toobin’s A Vast Conspiracy and Joe Conason and Gene Lyon’s Hunting of the President, not to mention the relevent chapters of Bill’s and Hillary’s memoirs.

I could make a long list of histories and biographies that I think rise to the level of literature, that are in fact literature of a greater order than most contemporary novels written by the Novel-writing class. Maybe later. If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

What I’m getting at is that as a reader I don’t feel short-changed by the fact that there aren’t more serious political novels out there.

I also happen to like mysteries and thrillers and highly recommend the political thrillers of Ross Thomas and Richard Condon.

But, finally, I think that Lehmann is wrong to say that Americans can’t write political fiction, because his definition of political fiction is too limited.

He seems to think that a political novel is a novel about politicians, particularly politicians who are either in Washington or on their way there.

Politics is the way societies put themselves together, and the way a society puts itself together has been—at least until very recently here—the theme of the Novel. It can be argued that every novel is a political novel, it’s just that in some novels politics is more explicitly dramatized than in others.

Another day, another post.

Meanwhile, savvy and book-obsessed readers like the Linkmiester will probably note that the novel about the Alito confirmation drama has already been written.

Forty-six years ago.

Some minor plot differences. It’s a Democratic President, the nomination is for Secretary of State, but the characters and the dynamics are very similar and in some cases are exact parallels.

Advise and Consent by Alan Drury.