Landfall

In his fantastic latest, Mallon (Finale) recreates the political events of George W. Bush’s years as president—and their impact on Washington, D.C., and the world—so meticulously that they hardly seem the stuff of a fictional narrative. Spanning the decades from 1978, when the future president made a failed congressional bid, to his penultimate year in the White House in 2007, the novel gives dramatic scope and heft to incidents that defined his presidency post-9/11, especially America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Hurricane Katrina’s ravaging of New Orleans in 2005. (The characters consider the administration’s management of these two events somewhat similar.) Mallon provides juicy, humanized depictions of interactions between the familiar talking heads of state—including moments of disdainful disregard between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and between the president and his v-p—that will leave readers wondering how much of what he portrays is imagined. And he uses the personal evasion and deception that challenge the amorous relationship between invented characters Ross Weatherall, a disillusioned director for the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and Allison O’Connor, a key Iraq negotiator in the president’s National Security Council, as a lens through which to scrutinize the political strategies of the era. This novel makes a fascinating flesh-and-blood spectacle out of moments now relegated to history. (Feb.)