A novel should be more than just an artifact of imagination; it should be an act of revelation. That’s no less true of workaday genre books than it is of the most deliberately literary works: What distinguishes a good Michael Crichton or John Grisham book from the packs of airport imitators is neither tireless invention nor technical mastery of scene and plot nor the skillful sketching of character but a sense that even amid the trappings of fictional convention, they are showing us something about the world, grasping toward some kind of unique and uncomfortable truth beyond what we can find just by reading the papers and watching the news.
This is why so many novels by politicians, government officials, and those in their orbit—and there are plenty of them! Newt Gingrich! Jim Webb! Lynne Cheney! The Clintons!—are so frequently disappointing. Even at their wackiest—Gingrich’s alternate histories; Cheney’s ribald semi-disavowed Western romance—they stop short of saying much. They perform the tricks, but they never pull back the curtain.
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