Robert Penn Warren, who in 1986 was named the nation's first Poet Laureate, won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for this tremendous novel. It is my personal pick for the Great American Novel and I would place it just below Orwell on the Top 100 of the 20th Century list.
Most will be familiar with it's Huey Long derived tale of the rise and fall of populist politician Willie Stark. Jack Burden, the narrator, is a newspaperman who hitches himself to Stark's rising star. Eventually, Stark calls on Burden to get the goods on the lilly white Judge Irwin, the surrogate father of Jack's youth and a man of widely acknowledged rectitude:
Jack: But suppose there isn't anything to find.
Stark: There is always something.
Jack: Maybe not on the Judge.
Stark: Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption
and he passeth from the
stink to the diddie to the stench of the shroud. There is always
something.
Sure enough, Jack digs until he finds the ugly truth and unleashes a
series of
shocking revelations and tragic deaths.
I'm sure that this must seem too cynical to some, but it is actually
a marvelous retelling of the essential Puritan democratic myth that informs
the American system. Politics after all is nothing but a system of
choices about how some men will wield power over other men. All of
the choices are bad, but the
alternative--the lawless State of Nature--is worse and so we try to
make the best bad choices possible. But we must remain ever vigilant
against those who wield power over us & noone is more dangerous than
the populist or the do-gooder who cloaks himself in the mantle of the Good
& the Right. FDR and his New Deal come hand in glove with interring
the Japanese Americans and packing the Supreme
Court. LBJ and Civil Rights are accompanied by profound personal
corruption and Viet Nam. And, of course, when you elect the purely
evil, you get Detente + Watergate or the Health Care Plan + Monica + Chinagate,
etc. The only politicians who are even mildly trustworthy are those
who renounce the very powers of government--George Washington, William
McKinley, Calvin Coolidge, Eisenhower & Reagan.
This is a book that John Adams would have loved and you will too.
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (A+)
