Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” epitomizes his strengths and weaknesses. He doggedly pursues a story and works sources, aided by the fact that he no longer needs to meet a daily deadline, and produces fly-on-the-wall peeps inside ordinarily closed worlds.
His sources are unnamed, but often the same people keep popping up, so you suspect you know who’s doing the talking. In this narrative of the first 18 months in the Trump White House, it looks likely some of the loose lips belong to Rob Porter, Gary Cohn, and perhaps Jared Kushner and John Dowd. Not surprisingly, they come across as islands of sanity in sea of crazy. Or like little Dutch boys with their fingers in the dike.
The headline crazy actions are known to all by now, but there is a kind of grim horror to be had from the sheer accumulation of instances of a president prepared to act recklessly despite knowing nothing and refusing to learn about foreign policy, economics, science, military matters, law, history or government.
Woodward’s flaws include his lack of style and analysis. Joan Didion once called him a stenographer, and there’s a kind of rude truth to that. Yes, reporters are supposed to furnish facts not opinions, but putting facts in a larger context is needed to demonstrate their significance. When Trump uses disparaging language, hyperbole, insults to a subordinate, it is impolite, to a nuclear-armed adversary something else.
The book is also clumsily organized. It is chronological, but tells no unified story. Each chapter is just another scene that has been described to Woodward, another day at the White House, another meeting in which bizarre presidential behavior flummoxes his aides or on a whim trashes plans laboriously prepared by cabinet secretaries, Senators and experienced professionals.
The final pages seem hastily added, and the end point arbitrary — the resignation of Trump attorney John Dowd when he concludes his client will never follow his advice. This slapdash termination suggests Woodward wrapped up the manuscript more to meet a publication date than to produce a rounded narrative.
Readers seeking a book focused on the Mueller investigation will be disappointed. Most of the pages are devoted to Trump’s incompetence as manager of the government he heads, particularly in regard to economic and foreign policy. But if the sources who haven’t yet been fired keep leaking, we may get a sequel someday which can be named, as was his second Nixon book, “The Final Days.”
If “Fear” is a kind of tragic horror show, the winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, “Less,” belongs to the realm of comedy or romance. The book is named for its hapless, fiftyish protagonist, Arthur Less, a minor novelist from California, “too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered.” We meet him at the low point of his life and career.
His lover, Freddy, has dumped him and is now engaged to marry, and Less is invited to the wedding. He can’t face that and flees, impulsively accepting a slew of absurd invitations he has previously ignored.
They will take him around the world on a picaresque journey — to interview a best-selling science-fiction writer whose works he has never read in New York, to attend an awards ceremony in Italy because one of his books is on the shortlist, to Germany to teach a course though his long ago high school German will prove hopeless, to India to a writer’s retreat in an Ashram.
Along the way he learns his latest novel has been rejected by his publisher, endures other heartbreaks and farcical complications, suddenly sees how to repair his book if not his life, and is interrupted before he can reach Japan by a summons from home. His first love, the aging poet Robert Brownburn, has had a stroke and is dying. But when Less arrives at the deathbed, it turns out the dying man is recovering nicely, which leads to an unexpected twist on the last page when the identity of the narrator of Arthur’s adventures is revealed.
The book is beautifully constructed, melancholy and hilarious, and a rare case of a comic novel being awarded a major literary prize. In literature, as in the world of film, comedy gets far less respect that it deserves. But “Less” is more than just laughs. It is a sweet meditation on the absurdity of the human condition. And after all the travails to which it subjects poor Arthur, himself the author of a book called “Kalipso,” it manages to bestow a happy ending on the hero returning to where his journey began.
And speaking of the voyaging hero, I have recently reread a book from about fifty years ago in anticipation of a trip to the Mediterranean. It is “Ulysses Found” by Ernle Bradford. He served in the Royal Navy during World War II, and passed his time when not on duty reading the Odyssey again and again while passing through the scenery it describes.
A few years after the war, he and his wife bought a boat and spent several years sailing the wine dark sea. He came to believe, as Schliemann had in reading the Iliad, that the works of Homer could be trusted to depict a real world, not a fantasy realm. “Ulysses Found,” sails the reader to the land of the Lotus Eaters, the Laistrygonians, the isles of Circe and Calypso and the haunts of the Cyclopes, the Sirens and Helios. It is the next best thing to setting sail yourself in search of the way home from Troy to Ithaca.