Mr. Stupid Goes to Washington: A Political Satire

Wealthy Brent Bibby, a politician with a good tennis game and a Senate seat his father bought him, stumbles in on his beautiful wife Lucinda in flagrante with Gov. Roger Ross. Straining for a plausible excuse, Ross, the apparent Republican Presidential nominee, ends up asking Bibby to be his running mate. Based on the proposition that someone as stunningly stupid as Bibby could rise to the Vice Presidency, this satire, a first novel by the national editor of Spy , reworks familiar jokes, capturing a fractured Presidential syntax (such as in Ross's inner monologues on doughnuts) and setting Bibby's gleefully dim witticisms in embarrassingly public scenes. At its best, the cautionary tale is so blindingly funny that it's impossible to laugh and still keep one's eyes on the page; at its worst, it's rompingly absurd. Malanowski wickedly reduces statecraft to constituent elements of pomposity, puerility and payback, while he keeps the scenes in the politicians' inner sanctums always vaguely familiar, equal parts National Public Radio and Saturday Night Live . This gifted satirist's delightful election-year broadside is as accurate as it is preposterous. (Sept.)