I begin by repeating my spoiler alert from last week. This concerns the final chapters of an E.L. Doctorow novel published in 2014, the last one he published (he died the following year). IF YOU WANT TO COME TO IT FRESH, YOU WILL NOT WANT THE REVELATIONS I AM ABOUT TO MAKE!
Anyone still here? Okay, then.
Andrew's time as a teacher at a DC high school is brief. He soon, accidentally, and in a manner I won't relate, comes to the attention of President George W. Bush. We learn only at this point that the two knew each other -- indeed, they had been roommates at Yale as undergrads. They had both been involved in what seem like typical frat-boy hijinks, and in at least one such instance Andrew had taken the blame to help keep the Bush family crest clean re one such hijink, involving a Bunsen burner in a Yale lab.
Someone in the Bush staff gets nervous that someone like that -- someone who could tell such tales to the press corps -- is in DC. So they press Andrew to take a made-up job, with a basement office in the White House, the duty of sporadically briefing the President on "developments in neurology," and -- the crucial point from their point of view -- an elaborate non-disclosure agreement.
Andrew, for reasons never very clearly explained, leaves the teaching job for this made-up job. I note that the reasons are not clearly explained because that is itself a plot point. Presumably some salary comes with the basement office, but it isn't invoked as a draw. Andrew had enjoyed his time as a high school teacher, he says at one point he had discovered "a strong sympathetic connection to the place" and to the pupils "caught up in their exuberant time of life." He doesn't seem to have had any ambitions ... yet he agrees and moves into the basement office of the White House. Why?
There is a hint. He does tell "Doc," to whom the whole monologue of a book is addressed, that he is aware of the background to his wife's death, and the deaths of so many others, on 9/11. "Those flights should never have happened," he tells Doc. "The intelligence was there."
Doc asks if he blamed the President for this. He replies, equivocally, "Who am I to blame anyone for anything?".
Who is he, indeed? Over the days that followed the abrupt change of jobs he came to see himself as a Holy Fool inside the Oval Office, near the Throne as it were.
The last briefing he gives as neurology czar, in an Oval Office with W, Cheney, and Rumsfeld (called "Chaingang and Rumbum" here, in imitation of W's own practice of giving everyone cutesy nicknames) -- ends with a tirade. He tells that troika:
"I told them it depressed me to be in the same room with them. The President looked at me -- did I mean him as well? You all live unquestioningly inside the social reality -- war, God, money -- that other people invented long ago, I said, and you take these things for raw existence. It was quite a speech I gave them."
He concluded that speech by doing a handstand. In the oval office. A clumsy nerdish fellow from what we know of him -- but Briony had been a gymnast at the college where they met, a handstand would have come naturally to her -- and "I think I groaned, the blood pounding in my head, but it seemed to me a matter of honor to remain upside down as long as possible."
That image, of their Holy Fool upside down, is the climax of the book. What little remains is resolution. Chaingang demands that the secret service take him away, says he was threatening the President. As they are taking him away, the Holy Fool gets off a few last words as a government employee, "You are only the worst so far, there is far worse to come. Perhaps not tomorrow, perhaps not next year, but you have shown us the path into the Dark Wood."
Odd words to read in 2026, as another war rages in the Persian Gulf, where our forces are commanded by a man from whose worse or worst tendencies the daughter-of-Chaingang herself briefly sought to rescue us.
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