I confess up front that I did not finish Sen. Barbara Boxer’s
new novel, A Time to Run. I tried, honest, and found it unreadable.
I can, however, tell you everything you need to know about it:
Democrats wear white hats, Republicans, black. The sex is stilted,
predictable (
”
she felt his competent hands undressing her
”
). And the prose
– ah, the prose. Let’s just say, to borrow the book’s one
memorable phrase, that it smells astringently of aftershave.
I confess up front that I did not finish Sen. Barbara Boxer’s new novel, A Time to Run. I tried, honest, and found it unreadable. I can, however, tell you everything you need to know about it: Democrats wear white hats, Republicans, black. The sex is stilted, predictable (“she felt his competent hands undressing her”). And the prose – ah, the prose. Let’s just say, to borrow the book’s one memorable phrase, that it smells astringently of aftershave.
It’s one thing to pull strings in politics, but when politics are used to turn characters into marionettes, the reader can see the strings. Bringing these wooden people to life was more difficult than she realized.
But the more fundamental problem is this. If Boxer felt compelled to dip her toes into art’s waters – and risk its rip tide – she should at least have done so honestly.
Boxer worked with a ghostwriter, ignoring that the reader will inevitably conclude that the book would have been worse had Boxer written it alone. In this case, that’s a scary prospect.
Mary-Rose Hayes was Boxer’s ghost. A writer of “sleek sexy Cinderella” stories (according to one reviewer), her name appears in the tiniest of print on the dust jacket. I pray that hints at embarrassment for the result.
So whom do we blame for the book’s turgidity? One thing seems clear: Politicians like Boxer, surrounded by true believers and accustomed to dipping their pens in poison instead of ink, often don’t understand that ideological contamination can easily throw the fragile ecology of art’s landscape out of balance.
Let’s not cast too much blame on Mary-Rose. This is Boxer’s book, although we’ll never know how much of it she composed. And therein lies Boxer’s chief sin. It’s one thing to hire a ghost to help with your memoirs. We understand that relationship: the subject recounts, the writer accounts.
But a novel? Writing a novel is not a collaborative venture. Encyclopedias are collaborations. The novel is the apogee of literary achievement, a book’s artistic success measured by its vision and language. The clarity and uniqueness of its voice is the author’s currency. How else do we know Faulkner, Woolf, Tolstoy? Most literary rules were made to be broken, but not this one.
The busy Boxer may have seen her decision to hire Ms. Hayes merely as an expedient, although it betrayed a lack of courage. Perhaps there was also an element of the liberal impulse to collectivize. No one shoulders blame, but success is diluted.
Republicans, not known for great taste in art, at least and to their credit talk a good game about meritocracy, in which the bar of individual success is set high and the rewards reaped accordingly.
But this begs another question: What was her publisher, Chronicle Books – a fine and normally innovative press – buying, the manuscript or the author? A novel this weak suggests a cynical calculation – that any book by a U.S. senator is guaranteed to sell some minimum number of copies.
Given her position, Boxer should have striven for more creative honesty and sought out a publisher the way Lynn Stegner did with her first novel.
Lynn is the wife of Page and daughter-in-law of the late Wallace Stegner. When she submitted Undertow to publishers, she sent it out under her first and middle names, Lynn Marie, fearing the name Stegner would create absurdly high expectations. That, I think, was excessive humility on her part. It is just as possible that the name would have given her, in the eyes of publishers, a similar marketing advantage.
Nevertheless, Lynn’s was the honest approach, and it made her eventual acceptance, based on the book’s merits, a thrill to both her and her publisher.
I doubt going that route ever occurred to Boxer. Membership in one of the world’s most exclusive clubs must give one a sense of self-importance and entitlement that makes it easy to assume that the tenets of artistic integrity don’t apply to you. That makes it okay to hire a ghost, write an artistically hamstrung novel, trade on your status to sell it, and in the end claim dubious credit for a book you can’t substantiate having written.
Boxer should have confined her need for recognition to the ballot box.
It is better to go unpublished and be thought a poor writer than to apply pen to paper and remove all doubt.
