primary_colors

PRIMARY COLORS by Anonymous (Joe Klein)

1996. Vintage. Paperback. Film tie-in edition. 473 pages.

This is by far my favourite US political fiction book. Others in the
same field are Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and various novels
of Gore Vidal's. Hunter S Thompson and P J O'Rourke are both very
fine political writers but like many journalists stick to facts and
opinion, not fiction.

An interesting blend of political fiction and non-fiction is Joe Eszterhas's
"American Rhapsody" on the Monica Lewinsky affair. I found that very
entertaining for the first 90 pages or so then gave up. Strange.

The story of Joe Klein's unmasking as the Anonymous author of
Primary Colors is a very early example of Big Data in action.
Obviously the author was a political insider and probably a political
journalist. Sophisticated computer programs were used to check
stylistic habits of hundreds of journalists against the Primary Colors
text. It didn't take long to correctly finger Klein as the author.
This was way back in 1996. The publishing date of 1996 is significant;
in the middle of Bill Clinton's re-election campaign or just after?
In November 1992 Bill Clinton beat single-term president George H. Bush,
with third party candidate Ross Perot spoiling and splitting the
Right-wing vote. In November 1996, CLinton easily won re-election
against the ailing Bob Dole, a war veteran not of Vietnam but of
World War II.

In Primary Colors, real people are disguised under fictional guises.
This is also the main feature of the great Australian novel of
corruption and backroom influence Power Without Glory by Frank Hardy (1950).

Primary Colors is narrated by trusted campaign staffer Henry Burton.
Burton is both attracted and repelled by Governor Jack Stanton,
a charismatic Democratic candidate for his party's nomination to run
against an incumbent Republican President (the name Bush occurs
exactly once). Scandal old and new dogs Stanton's campaign. He dodged
the draft to Vietnam and called in favours when arrested at anti-war
protests. The recent scandals are tawdry sex scandals; sex with his
wife's hairdresser (the fantastically named Cashmere McLeod) and the
accusation of impregnating an African-American teenager.

Curiously there's no hint of any financial or Gubernatorial
corruption, akin to the real-life Clinton Whitewater affair.
This would probably be an affair that a political staffer wouldn't
be aware of and is left out of the book for that reason.

Primary Colors was made into an excellent film with John Travolta,
Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thornton, Adrian Lester and Kathy Bates.
Two of the main actors (Thompson and Lester) are British but give
first rate American performances. The movie seems less well-regarded
than "Wag the Dog" which is a one-joke film in my opinion. Give me
Primary Colors any day.

This is my third or fourth reading of this book; I picked up a lot
more on the race-relations aspect of Henry Burton with the Black
and White communities. The colorful (I'm spelling it this way for
the first and last time in my life) cast of come and go political
staffers is also memorable. The concept of Campaign Sex is well
explained throughout the book.

I've read Joe Klein's second book The Running Mate years ago and I'll
try to re-read it next year (it was a very entertaining book the only
part I remember is mention of the Elvis Presley movie Harum Scarum).
I have a third nonfiction book of his on US Politics. He was a political
writer for The New Yorker for a while though others seem to write the
politics for that magazine nowadays.

                                          14th November 2019.

My book reviews are at https://github.com/stucooper/booksiveread