November marks the midterm Congressional elections in the United States, a tense and ominous bellwether of the presidential election to follow in two years' time. And in addition to shining a spotlight on the illicit joys of the country's true national obsession, election seasons remind us that the subject has inspired as much glorious creativity as it has venal power-mongering. The sordid spectacle has always attracted writers of all stripes, and as a result, political literature is as varied as the political landscape. Here are ten titles to get you through the long national nightmare:The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor – One of the two truly indispensable American political novels, O'Connor's hilarious, bittersweet 1956 novel tells the story of wise old warhorse Frank Skeffington's final race to be mayor of an unnamed city that couldn't any more clearly be Boston if it came with GPS longitude and latitude. In these warm and gently sentimental pages, the good-riddance old days of ward bosses and backroom deals is given a glowingly ambiguous wake, but the human nuances O'Connor captures so perfectly never change.All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren – The other of those two indispensable American political novels, this 1946 masterpiece is made of much darker stuff than O'Connor's wistful comedy; it chronicles the rise and destruction of Dixie governor Willie Stark, and the appalled reader watches as the waves of that destruction engulf all the book's characters. The artistry here is on a par with The Last Hurrah but wrought of anger, deceit, and Oedipal betrayal.People Will Always Be Kind by Wilfrid Sheed – This wry 1973 novel is one of the perennially underrated Sheed's most underrated novels, a mandarin dark comedy about polio victim Brian Casey, who learns how to leverage his affliction in order to manipulate everybody he meets – including, inevitably, the nation's gullible voters. Sheed is a terrifically smart writer; every line of his prose is whittled to perfection, and his observations about the more gerrymandered aspects of the American political system are, sadly, every bit as relevant today as they were a generation ago.Washington, D.C. by Gore Vidal – This 1967 book, part of Vidal's uneven “Narratives of Empire” series (last in the chronology of the series, though the first published), charts the personal and political intersections of a small and tightly-controlled cast of characters, foremost among them battered old senator Clay Burden Day and oily up-and-comer Clay Overbury. The book's action shifts from caucus chamber to Georgetown cocktail party to power-broker boardrooms, and the pages hiss and pop with the venom and caustic disillusionment of the ultimate insider. This is Vidal's best political novel and a close contender for the best thing he ever wrote.Pogo by Walt Kelly – There's something oddly fitting about the fact that the single greatest fictional meditation on American politics should be an absurdist comic strip, and so it is: the sublime Pogo, created by cartoonist Walt Kelly in the wake of World War II and joyously maintained for some thirty years, more knowingly skewers the baseline inanity of the election game than any other attempt, and the wonder is that it manages such an inquiry without ever being mean or bitter itself. The strip follows the misadventures of a peaceful, unassuming possum named Pogo (Ponce de Leon Montgomery County Alabama Georgia Beauregard Possum) as he idles away his days in the Okefenokee Swamp with his various scheming, conniving friends (who often draft him to run for president) and a huge rotating cast of guest-stars, many of whom are merrily-recognizable animal-versions of current political figures. The foibles and contradictions of the critters Pogo encounters are likewise recognizable, alas; long before the strip's iconic motto “We have met the enemy, and he is us” had become famous, its truth was uncontested.Presidents and Pies by Isabel Anderson – Fiction has its place, of course, but the real primers for the world of Washington are the memoirs and histories written by the Dupont Circle insiders, and this is of course as true of the past as of the present. A sparkling example from a long-vanished time is this wonderful 1920 memoir written by a Washington hostess and ambassador's wife of her time at the heart of the social scene during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Anderson warmly captures an era when, as she put it, “politics stops at the dinner's first course.” Critics bemoaning a lack of civility in the capital in 2014 will read Anderson's account with frank disbelief.Man of the House by “Tip” O'Neill – Some echoes of that vanished congeniality still linger in this 1987 autobiography by legendary Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O'Neill, but they're distant and fading fast, mostly bolstered by O'Neill's crusty but gregarious public persona. O'Neill was a major power-broker for decades in Congress, a veteran of thunderous public clashes (and equally-resounding closed-door showdowns) with presidents and political opponents, and Man of the House tells many of the best of those stories, with a minimum of cleaning-up.The Friends of Richard Nixon by George V. Higgins – There was no possibility of cleaning up the insider tale of the Watergate scandal that prompted the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the indictment of so many players in his administration, and thankfully, Higgins doesn't even try in this scathing 1975 dissection of the rock-bottom low point in American politics. A novelist by trade (the book's title is a nod to his masterpiece, The Friends of Eddie Coyle), Higgins in these pages fuses his mastery of storytelling with his burning-hot hatred of thugs and criminals in the Nixon White House – foremost among them Nixon himself. In its outraged sense of betrayal, Higgins' book is a timeless and heart-breakingly accurate picture of what Watergate was like for the citizens who watched it happen.Washington by Meg Greenfield – This slim and sardonic 2001 memoir was published posthumously; Greenfield died in 1999 after a lifetime spent writing perfectly-sharpened vignettes of the capital in storied runs at The Washington Post and Newsweek, and her memoir captures with merciless clarity the often ridiculous and juvenile (but no less deadly) ego-drives that motivate the waves of politicians who come to her beloved city every season. The latter parts of Greenfield's memoir usher in a Washington that will be instantly recognizable to politics-watchers of 2014: a stage stripped of heroes or true believers, where transparent absurdity has become the ruling ethos. Greenfield would have watched the upcoming midterm elections with avid interest – but there would have been generous helpings of rue as well.Millie's Book as dictated to Barbara Bush – What more therapeutic way to round off our list than with this enormously sweet 1990 memoir by one Washington belle who remained blissfully bipartisan her entire time in the capital? Millie, an adored springer spaniel waited upon by the family and staff of President George H. W. Bush, narrates a typical sample in her life as First Pet, from meetings with the great and powerful to unauthorized digging in the White House gardens. Millie wasn't the first Bush family dog to write a book, but hers was the first such book to spend months on the New York Times bestseller list, maybe in part because the campaign-weary American people liked being reminded of something they should keep in mind this month: elections come and go, but midday naps sprawled in the sun retain their charm.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.
