THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602160723
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KERRY DOUGHERTY
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
PRIMARY COLORS
A Novel of Politics
ANONYMOUS
Random House. 366 pp. $24.
Primary Colors is so much more than a political novel. It's a parlor game. A mystery. A thinly veiled account of the brutal 1992 Democratic primary season.
The publicity surrounding this book has everyone in Washington, and that includes President Clinton, abuzz.
And the question on everyone's mind: ``Who wrote it?''
For the first time ever Random House has published a book by an anonymous author. Spokespersons for the publishing house insist that not even their publisher, Harold Evans, knows the identity of the author. The deal for the book was struck by a middle-man who never disclosed the writer's name. All editing on the book was done by mail.
Is the author someone in the Clinton administration? A political reporter who covered the campaign? One of the campaign workers? Random House employees are not saying, if they know. And why should they? The mystery has been good for business.
Most major-newspaper reviewers have been gushing about the prose, pointing out that whoever wrote this book should be a full-time writer, if he's not already. That's a bit over the top. The writing is good enough, but the characters tend to be one-dimensional. National reviewers may be worried about pointing out the flaws in the novel, lest they offend a friend who might have penned it.
The book is a good read, though. But the technique of thinly disguising real-life figures and then placing them in historically correct settings is distracting. One is caught keeping up with the plot, recalling what really happened and trying to decipher the characters.
Some of the secondary characters in Primary Colors are either entirely fictional or amalgams of real people. Anyone who watched the campaign closely may be able to puzzle them out, but mere mortals probably cannot.
The Clintons are here - are they ever. Gov. Jack Stanton and his lawyer-wife Susan are portrayed as strange visionaries, partners in a peculiar union who will do anything to get what they want. He has a libido the size of the state he governs. She also has affairs - and it is implied that her partners are both male and female.
The campaign is managed by an insane cast of characters, including Richard Jemmons, presumably Jim Carville, Clinton's ragin' Cajun. The narrator, Henry Burton, is an African American and the grandson of a famous civil rights leader, but conventional wisdom says this is George Stephanopoulos.
Henry, a moral, good guy most of the time, is torn by his idealism, his political instincts, his love of the political game and his loyalty to the Stantons.
In a telling scene, Henry meets Luther Charles, a character not unlike Jesse Jackson, in a New York bar. The Jackson character is attempting to persuade Henry to leave the Stanton campaign. To help, he introduces Henry to an attractive African-American lawyer who had an affair with Stanton when they were in college.
``He loved her. He loved me. He loved every stray cat in the quad,'' the woman says, remembering how Stanton two-timed her in college. ``That boy is not deficient in the love zone - he's got more than enough to go around, and it's all legit. He's never fakin' it. . . . In my mind I knew I'd never really have him. He was too needy and it wasn't the usual male kind of needy.''
There's just enough sex, enough of a personal glimpse at these people who bear such a striking resemblance to the Clintons, to keep you turning the pages. The writer seems to have captured the essence of the cutthroat primary season. And since much of the story is set in the bleak weeks before the New Hampshire primary, the timing of the book's publication is perfect.
The problem with Primary Colors is that one puts the book down inevitably thinking one has gained some insight into the Clintons. But all the reader really knows are delicious details about the bizarre life and times of Jack Stanton. MEMO: Kerry Dougherty is a staff editorial writer. by CNB