Last December I watched Advise and Consent, the excellent 1962 movie by Otto Preminger. The film is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the same title by Allen Drury published in 1959.
Thomas Mellon, whose last novel, Fellow Travelers, I liked a lot, has written a paper on Allen Drury's Advise and Consent in the New York Times Review of Books for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. The paper is somewhat critical...
Of course, the novel wasn't entirely believable even in its own day. (...) In its preoccupation with the mesh of personality and process, Drury's book resembles not so much any Washington novel by Henry Adams or Gore Vidal or Ward Just as it does one of C.P. Snow's schematic renditions of high drama in the faculty lounge and parliamentary cloakroom. (...) Unfortunately, Drury was the kind of nonfiction-writer turned novelist who remains better at telling than showing. (...) Even reviewers impressed by the plotting and insiderliness of Advise and Consent had doubts about its literary merits...
Despite of that, Advise and Consent
the plot [of which] turns on the blackmailing of Brigham Anderson, a young senator from Utah whose wartime homosexual affair, once exposed by extreme proponents of the nominee for State, leads the senator to shoot himself inside his office on a Sunday afternoon,
remains attractive. Maybe as a summer read?
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