How the rise of Trump persuaded one novelist it was time for facts

Richard North Patterson at his home in Massachusetts.Credit:New York Times

There was a president whose psyche he did want to occupy in his fiction: President Kerry Kilcannon, the liberal fantasy of what Robert F. Kennedy might have been if he had lived to become president. The hunky, blue-eyed (with flecks of green) Kilcannon stars in a trilogy of Patterson books, overcoming childhood trauma to become a senator and then president, battling the gun lobby, following his conscience, marrying the woman he loves.

The policy discussion in the novels is wrapped in an adventure and a love story. As Patterson writes in Balance of Power, the third book in the trilogy: "This aspect of his worldview – that good fortune was an accident – was, in Lara's mind, fortified by his certainty that gunfire had made him president: first by killing James, the deserving brother; then by wounding Kerry, causing the wave of sympathy which, last November, had helped elect him by the narrowest of margins."

But now Patterson is coming straight to the point, in writing about the actual President. "Trump's self-absorption is total," he wrote recently. "His inability to accurately perceive external reality is profound. Because this renders our President deeply anti-social and anti-historical, his worldview begins and ends with 'Trump'."

Patterson wrote his last fictional paragraph more than seven years ago, when he put the finishing touches on Eden in Winter, the final volume in a trilogy about a powerful New England family harbouring dark secrets. He had been feeling restless for some time. Some of the social and political issues he wanted to include in his books were getting harder to sell to editors worried about competition and bottom lines in the shrinking publishing industry.

The 2016 presidential campaign, and the startling rise of Trump as a viable candidate, brought Patterson back to political writing, an early passion that he had put aside to work first as a lawyer and then as a novelist. (He began life as a "ferocious conservative Republican", he said, before moving to the left. Among his earlier political-adjacent jobs were being assigned to work with the Watergate special prosecutor while a young trial attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission. More recently, he was chairman of the non-partisan government accountability group Common Cause.)

He wrote a series of articles for HuffPost about the 2016 campaign; his first nonfiction book, Swamp Fever, a compilation of his articles, was published in 2017; he also wrote a column for The Boston Globe.

At The Bulwark, he writes alongside contributors like Jeff Greenfield, Molly Jong-Fast and Stuart Stevens. The magazine does not release circulation figures, but it is fair to say that its audience is smaller than that for Patterson's novels.

Novelists have always used fiction as a way to process and reorder reality, to make sense of the world and provide a better version of it. Let's say you did want to write a novel about Trump that was both believable – within the realm of possibility – and clearly fictional.

That is what many authors are doing with novels set in futures ravaged by climate change, for instance; it is what Margaret Atwood did (kind of) in The Testaments, her sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, published in 2019. That is what the CBS legal drama The Good Fight does, with lawyers who engage with Trump administration policies. (Trump is a character of sorts on the show, albeit offstage.)

Richard North Patterson’s library of presidential and political biographies. He argues that Trump is an unprecedented figure in US politics.Credit:New York Times

But the things that have actually occurred during the Trump administration seem improbable enough without trying to turn the dial up to 11 in an invented story, Patterson said. "I don't want to be trying to come up with fiction that is a dramatic leap forward from what we already have," he said. "It would be almost impossible. It would lapse into parody."

As a novelist, Patterson prided himself on the deep, almost journalistic-level research he did for his books. He conducted more than 100 interviews, for instance, for Exile, which delved into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For Protect and Defend, which concerns the confirmation battle of a Supreme Court nominee who supports late-stage abortion, he sought advice from Bob Dole, a former Republican Senate majority leader and presidential nominee, about how he would go about stopping the nominee, and from Bill Clinton, then the president, about what he would do to get her confirmed.

Patterson's job put him in proximity to power, and he was especially close to president George Bush snr and to Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain. "I knew those three men very well," he said. "No one is perfect, but I knew what they cared about and knew they were good and serious people."

Trump is something else entirely, Patterson said: both author and star of a fictional narrative that he invents – and that then becomes its own truth. With such a confusion between what is real and what is not, fiction itself has lost the ring of authenticity it once had.

The President "is operating on the basis that he is the hero of his own drama", Patterson said. "What he's done is turn American politics into this meta-fiction in which he's the star and he's going to spell out all the things that people resent. The connection between his reality and the facts is coincidental."

Patterson was finishing up a recent piece, in which he argues that Trump's narcissism and lack of empathy has gravely damaged US foreign policy. It is a theme he returns to often: the importance of understanding the psychology of those who would run the United States. As a novelist, he often consulted psychologists to get inside the heads of his characters.

Perhaps one day, Patterson said, he will return to fiction. But it does not feel like the right time. As a novelist, he said, "I would enter my fictional world every day, and I would absolutely believe in it. The characters and the situations were very real to me – I could feel and visualise them – but when I left that world, I would re-enter the world of reality."

That is no longer possible, he said.

"The problem with Trump is that his fiction is all-enveloping," he went on. "Reality – his own extreme reality – is whatever he needs it to be. The fiction, the story he's telling, never stops."

The New York Times

Source: Read Full Article