Very academic title, that. In fact, I have always wanted to write about the characterization of politics in novels, but that is something left to a graduate student in literature, political science, although there are undoubtedly ample opportunities for cross-disciplinary work like this. While the academic literature in political science, works such as The American Voter, The New American Voter, Citizen Politics and Party Systems and Electoral Systems, provide facts from which we can draw inferences, works of fiction like Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah contain as much truth about how political systems work. We can take all the cross-tabulations, typologies, and indices from the former and connect them to characters, actions and motivations in the latter.
There are four novels that I read in pairs, which would form a nice core of political fiction. The first two have a personal point of view, and would (in the academic parlance of political science) be from the rationalist perspective. The books are not deliberately or ostensibly political; they are both the stories of men at the point of middle age. The second two are books written deliberately as comments on American politics and, in fact, address the same essential question.
The first two are George Orwell's Coming Up For Air and Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt. These books work very well side-by-side, and are particularly good in comparing British and American culture. They are both set in that period of nervous energy between the First and Second World Wars, although Coming Up For Air occurs much closer to the war and uses the building expectations of conflict as a central theme. Both books have as their protagonists anti-heroes, both named George. (In fact, they have the same initials: George Bowling and George Babbitt.) These portrayals of men in the midst of a rapidly and violently changing world present real and believable depictions of anomie and alienation at the human level.
The second two books are Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and another Sinclair Lewis novel, It Can't Happen Here. These two form an obvious pair for comparison, (at least one review I read of Roth's book referred to Lewis's) as they are both "alternate histories" that examine the question of how far America was pushed toward fascism as a result of the Great Depression and the conflicts in Europe. The Lewis novel is not one of his best; the characters are a bit stock and the last third of the novel seems as though it were rushed to a conclusion. Lewis was an unreformed alcoholic, and several of his books have this problem. He would lose patience with himself and his creations and finish just for the sake of finishing. The Roth novel is, in my opinion, excellent. Some critics have complained that the historical scenario he paints is far-fetched and shows a poor opinion of the American public, especially rural America. History, however, has borne out more than one far-fetched scenario, and the American public only deserves the generosity it displays. In a country where a group of people (no matter how small) can make a practice of showing up at military funerals with signs saying "God Hates Fags" we need to admit we can expect the worst.
It was a pair of incidents from these second novels that gave me the idea (and the title) for this entry. In both books, the protagonists are having a hard time understanding the appeal of the charismatic political leaders who are vying for power. (In Roth's book that character is Charles Lindbergh, running for president against FDR on a "Stay Out of War in Europe" platform.) The pivotal episode for each, which allows them to see the grasp these men have on their audience -- if not succumb to it -- is a rally at Madison Square Garden. The similarities between the two episodes are striking and enlightening. One interesting difference is the perspective of the protagonists in each novel. Lewis has his hero attend the speech in person, while Roth's listens to the speech on the radio. Otherwise, the effect and the outcome are quite similar. Both stories show how appeals to emotion outweigh appeals to reason in the political arena. This is an important lesson more acutely and accurately conveyed in a novel than a textbook.
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