Matthew Quirk’s first novel carves its title from a cultural cliche: that there is “a list of the five hundred people inside the Beltway with real power, the select who [run] Washington and, by extension, the country.” That conceit has more in common with Facebook lists of the Greatest Rock Guitarists or Hollywood’s Hottest Superstars than with the chaos in which things get done in this country. But millions of Americans accept the cliche as true, and Quirk, a former writer for the Atlantic, has cleverly constructed his novel upon it.
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