Thomas Mallon. (2015). Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Thomas Mallon. 2015. Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Thomas Mallon, Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Thomas Mallon. Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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1. • value: Cold war
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17. • value: Historical Fiction
18. • value: political fiction
19. • value: Nostalgia
20. • value: Foreign Policy
21. • value: scandal
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23. • value: fiction books
24. • value: doubt
25. • value: historical novels
26. • value: political books
27. • value: Best books
28. • value: New York Times bestsellers
29. • value: historical fiction novels
30. • value: historical fiction books
31. • value: books historical fiction
32. • value: Iran Contra affair
33. • value: watergate books
34. • value: gifts for husband
35. • value: books fiction

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Mallon, Thomas
   • bioText: THOMAS MALLON is the author of nine novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, and Watergate. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Atlantic, and in 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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title

Finale

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A New York Times Notable Book
 
One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Adding to a fiction chronicle that has already spanned American history from the Lincoln assassination to the Watergate scandal, Thomas Mallon now brings to life the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president in modern times.
 
Finale captures the crusading ideologies, blunders, and glamour of the still-hotly-debated Reagan years, taking readers to the political gridiron of Washington, the wealthiest enclaves of Southern California, and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev.
 
Along with Soviet dissidents, illegal-arms traders, and antinuclear activists, the novel’s memorable characters include Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Pamela Harriman, John W. Hinckley, Jr. (Reagan’s would-be assassin), and even Bette Davis, with whom the president had long ago appeared onscreen. Several figures—including a humbled, crafty Richard Nixon; the young, brilliantly acerbic Christopher Hitchens; and an anxious, astrology-dependent Nancy Reagan (on the verge of a terrible realization)—become the eyes through which readers see the last convulsions of the Cold War, the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and a political revolution.
 
At the center of it all—but forever out of reach—is Ronald Reagan himself, whose genial remoteness confounds his subordinates, his children, and the citizens who elected him.
 
Finale is the book that Thomas Mallon’s work has been building toward for years.  It is the most entertaining and panoramic novel about American politics since Advise and Consent, more than a half century ago.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
   • content: AV Club"Amid a presidential campaign of stupefying banality, where candidates compete to say the emptiest sentiment in the least insightful way possible, what a pleasure it is to enter the rough-and-tumble politics of Thomas Mallon's historical novels. The elites of '80s government and media didn't need soundbites: They had passions....Mallon captures that uncertain tenor of the times while portraying the complex drama of high-level politics with real clarity and energy. His take on W. can't come soon enough."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Christian Science Monitor
   • content: "Illustrates the strength of Mallon's ability to cast even high-profile politicians as fellow humans....Wicked good, that Thomas Mallon."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Dallas Morning News
   • content: "This interesting and well-written book focuses on 1986--a year that proved to be Reagan's annus horribilis . . . At the front of the book, writer Mallon gives readers a cast-of-characters list. It teems with 99 characters--all but nine of them real-life people. And what a real-life variety!"
4. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "Like any historical novelist, Thomas Mallon can ride the fact train when he wants and jump off when he pleases, and perhaps only the most rigorous scholar of Reagan's time will know exactly where the research ends and the inventing starts. But even readers who don't remember the waning days of the Cold War will find masterful performances, by the author and by his subject, in Finale."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 13, 2015
     In this novel, Mallon (Watergate) fixes his wide-angle historical lens on the presidency of Ronald Reagan, in particular the events leading up to the exposé of the Iran-Contra affair in 1986. As befitting the author’s usual literary mode, Reagan himself is a minor character in his own story. The major characters include such real-life personalities as rising English journalist Christopher Hitchens, the much-married English socialite Pamela Harriman, and would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr. Worked in among these are several fictional characters, including Anders Little, an arms-control expert with a sexual secret; his friend, Anne Macmurray, an anti-nukes advocate; and her dying ex-husband, Peter Cox, a Texas contributor to Republican candidates. And of course, hovering in the background is “tan, rested and ready” Richard Milhouse Nixon in all his tragic Shakespearean glory, ever trying to restore his blackened legacy. Although largely plotless, the novel boasts a telephone book–sized cast of characters and fits them inside a chronicle large enough to encompass the Reagan-era gay revisionism of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and the gossip of Truman Capote’s “La Cote Basque, 1965.” What Mallon does best is dramatize the bizarre ’80s intersection of Hollywood and Washington, D.C., as equal weight is given to Merv Griffin and Eva Gabor as to Pat Buchanan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, creating in the process a crazy, quilted depiction of a contradiction-filled presidential administration.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from July 15, 2015
     Covering a momentous several months in 1986, this is an intriguing, humorous, even catty backstage view of the Reagan presidency from an artisan of the historical novel.Mallon (Watergate, 2012, etc.) picks up the political narrative a couple of years after his previous, Nixon-era novel. Reagan is preparing for his second summit with Gorbachev on nuclear disarmament. His wife, Nancy, who confers with her astrologer about the president's actions and with Merv Griffin on everything else, wields considerable influence in the White House. Also perfectly coiffed and politically muscular is the $100 million widow of Averell Harriman, Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, whose funding and machinations on the Democratic side expose the complex horse-trading ahead of that year's midterm election. To a four-page list of historical figures, Mallon adds a few fictional ones tied mainly to the Iran-Contra spectacle and Washington's gay insiders-dubbed the Homintern by Christopher Hitchens. The late journalist, a major character here and a subplot unto himself as he pursues the early inklings of Iran-Contra, was the dedicatee of Watergate and is described in this book's acknowledgements as a "beloved friend." The main plot, aside from history itself, concerns a popular president's sudden faltering amid crises abroad and at home. Mallon doesn't go far in plumbing the Reagan enigma that has stumped so many, but he creates revealing moments in the first couple's marriage. Historical fiction at this high level satisfies the appetite for speculation or even titillation through restraint as much as research, and Mallon rarely overdoes it-though he seems to have a weakness for insults, as in this small sample: "Pity anyone near Teddy's Cutty-Sarked breath during the delivery of all those aspirated aitches" (Hitchens on Edward Kennedy); "that little patent-leather martinet" (Nancy on John Tower); "a Faberge egg that talks" (Pat Nixon on Nancy). Mallon's version of history is close enough to fact to revive faded memories, while his imagining of who thought and said what presents some of the coherence and delights of fiction without the excesses of those "what if" rethinks scribbled by Newt Gingrich et al.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from July 1, 2015
     This most contemporary of Mallon's historically based novels is set amid the American political scene in late 1986. Those who remember the Reagan era will find all the happenings and brouhahas placed before their eyes again, like the War on Drugs, the AIDS crisis, the Reykjavik Summit on nuclear arms control, and the Iran-Contra disaster. All are related from numerous real and fictional characters' viewpoints, from journalist Christopher Hitchensfull of verbal zingersto Jimmy Carter, a craftily disturbed John Hinckley, and a still-influential ex-president Nixon. It takes gumption to fictionalize living people, and Mallon doesn't hold back on Nancy Reagan, a constant worrier who stage-manages her husband on her astrologer's advice. On the opposite side, Pamela Harriman seeks to find the perfect Democratic candidate. An older Anne Macmurray, the heroine from Dewey Defeats Truman (1997), plays a significant role, too. Reagan himself remains inscrutable, realistically so. When former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick calls him the most impersonally warm man I've ever encountered, she conveys his magnetism while pinning him down as well as anyone can. Despite all the scene-jumping, the transitions are seamless; there's a whirlwind of activity and abundant snappy dialogue. With his customary flair, Mallon has crafted a scrupulously researched novel that gives readers a front-row seat on world-changing eventsa combination that proves irresistible.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 1, 2015
     

     Mallon, a longtime master at fictionally realizing history (Watergate), here takes on the "Reagan years," specifically 1986. A few fictional subplots backdrop the main action, wherein a number of historical figures are given voice: Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Christopher Hitchens, even Bette Davis and John Hinckley. Except for Hinckley, the characters are nuanced, not simple pasteups. Take one of the principals, Nancy Reagan: astrology obsessed for sure but also self-aware ("The Gaze" is a ruse), reflective, and genuinely human. Those who absolutely adore or detest her will probably both be disappointed. So it is with the others. The book's centerpiece is the Iceland disarmament summit with Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and the tension is manifest. Readers who didn't experience this time in history--or who aren't familiar with the myriad luminaries who appear here, from Lindy Boggs through Jeanne Kirkpatrick and from Pat Moynihan to Mort Zuckerman--may feel at sea at times. But it's worth it for this well-developed snapshot of an important year. Oh, Reagan himself? He comes across as vaguely charming but unreadable to friend and foe alike. As Kirkpatrick "says" to Nixon: "You're complex, yes, but palpable. Reagan is smoke." VERDICT For all devotees of historical fiction and this time period.--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 15, 2015
     

     This new book from Mallon, author of the PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Watergate, is set in 1986, as the Cold War seeps away and a host of Soviet dissidents, illegal arms traders, and antinuclear activists brush up against the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Bette Davis (surprise!), and an inscrutable President Ronald Reagan.

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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A New York Times Notable Book
 
One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Adding to a fiction chronicle that has already spanned American history from the Lincoln assassination to the Watergate scandal, Thomas Mallon now brings to life the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president in modern times.
 
Finale captures the crusading ideologies, blunders, and glamour of the still-hotly-debated Reagan years, taking readers to the political gridiron of Washington, the wealthiest enclaves of Southern California, and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev.
 
Along with Soviet dissidents, illegal-arms traders, and antinuclear activists, the novel’s...

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