Face-Time: A Novel [Hardcover]

Erik Tarloff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 29, 1998

What if your girlfriend is sleeping with your boss? And what if your boss is the President of the United States?

These provocative questions are at the heart of Face-Time, a compulsively readable, devastatingly insightful, and darkly humorous morality tale about how celebrity, sex, power, and ultimately love collide in the corridors of the White House.

Face-Time is the story of Ben and Gretchen, two young political activists who meet and fall in love while working on a presidential campaign. When their candidate wins, both are given jobs in the new administration, his as an increasingly prominent speechwriter and hers in the Office of Social Affairs. But then Ben finds out that Gretchen has been sleeping with his boss,
the president, and he confronts her. Gretchen swears her love for Ben and vows to do anything to ensure their future happiness together...except end the affair. She has gained the ultimate Washington prize: one-on-one "face-time" with the president. And, perhaps not coincidentally, Ben's stock as a speechwriter has never been higher. But is the professional success worth the personal price?

Far more than an echo of recent headlines, this thoughtful, riveting novel by Washington insider Erik Tarloff is an important work of politically inspired fiction that poses a fascinating and culturally resonant question: In a society that venerates power and celebrity, how far are we willing to go to bring ourselves in proximity to them? With the inside-the-Beltway appeal
of Primary Colors coupled with the literary distinction of All the President's Men, Face-Time is a perceptive entertaining examination of the seductive power, both personal and professional, of position and status at the highest altitudes.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Face-Time is set at an unspecified date in the early 21st century, when the sex scandals rocking the presidency of Bill Clinton have faded into history--but the Washington, D.C., in which it takes place isn't too much different from that of 1998. Ben Krause is a thirtysomething speechwriter for charismatic president Charles Sheffield. His girlfriend, Gretchen, works in the White House travel office--and when President Sheffield catches sight of her at a party, he quickly executes his droit de seigneur. When he finally puts the pieces together, Ben is naturally less than thrilled... especially when Gretchen reports that she doesn't want to break up with him and she doesn't intend to stop servicing the chief executive.

First-time novelist Erik Tarloff--the husband of former Clinton advisor Laura Tyson and an occasional contributor to Clinton's speeches--has a firm sense of plot development, although at times the narration comes across as overerudite, as Ben casually drops allusions to Desmond Morris, the madwoman of Chaillot, Casablanca, and other topics that make the young protagonist seem about a decade or so older. But this is a minor quibble that does nothing to detract from the book's perfect suitability for a weekend's entertainment.

From Publishers Weekly

Political speechwriter Ben Krause discovers his girlfriend has better access to his boss?the president of the U.S.?than Ben does. The question, in Beltway insider Tarloff's timely first novel, is whether the affair really bothers him. Ben and curvaceous, plainspoken Gretchen Burns, who works in the White House Office of Social Affairs, make an ambitious young Washington couple who don't have to be told twice about the value of "face-time" or direct access to the president. They receive all the right invitations, including private film screenings with the president and first lady and their coterie of friends. There, Gretchen catches the commander in chief's eye and soon Ben is being sent out of town on unlikely peace missions. A wry, self-deprecating and appealing narrator given to gee-whiz expressions ("I know it sounds dopey and sappy"), Ben struggles with the issue of sharing his girlfriend with a man who, on one hand, is the leader of the free world, yet, on the other, represents a humiliating insult to his manhood. Gretchen, in contrast, remains the not terribly bright opportunist observers have come to recognize from presidential scandals, notwithstanding Tarloff's attempt to portray her sympathetically. The husband of Laura D'Andrea Tyson, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers for President Clinton, and a speechwriter himself, Tarloff has penned a book that is more a benign meditation on the effects of being cuckolded than a pointed political send-up, although his acute observations aptly illustrate how absolute power can corrupt absolutely. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 249 pages
• Publisher: Crown; First edition (December 29, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609604635
• ISBN-13: 978-0609604632
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,005,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What dreadful characters! What dreadful writing!, August 17, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Face-Time (Paperback)

Care to spend a few endless hours with a couple of characters who have absolutely no respect for each other or for themselves? Do you like characters that are less appealing than a 2-day root canal? Enjoy reading a book of "light satire" written in prose that makes the telephone directory seem fresh and clever by comparison? Do you love a tortoise-like pace, a leaden style, and an approach to humor that considers the word "shit" the ultimate bon mot? If so, boy does Mr. Tarloff have a book for you.

Consider just one sentence that demonstrates this author's distinctive style. You don't have to get far into the book to reach this first of many nadirs the book has to offer. It's in the second paragraph of the first chapter. Here it is:

"They come accompanied by a certain measure of irony, even self-satire, since a good part of her youth and adolescence was spent in Washington, and she graduated from Georgetown; she isn't exactly fresh off the farm."

What?

There are 256 pages of sentences like this facing anyone masochistic enough to try and shovel through it. Its almost impossible to make it all the way through, because the author keeps grabbing you around the ankles and throwing you to the ground with pointless, rambling, disjointed prose such as the quote above.

This book is a total waste of paper and ink and (worse) people's time. Despite the fact another write got the title first, this book is the one that truly deserves the title "Less Than Zero."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Neither black nor white nor much fun, December 11, 2001

By 

schapmock (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Face-Time (Paperback)

This sure sounded good. Joe Klein made an excellent novel out of similar material. Tarloff begins with an interesting premise and keeps his characters in the intriguing gray area of believable human behavior, their hats neither clearly white nor black.

So why is the novel not much fun, and eventually interminable, despite its brief length? Perhaps because it doesn't read like a novel, but rather like a prose outline for one: we are told everything, shown little. In theory, the story presented is interesting, but theory is all we get, and eventually it all gets kind of whiny and annoying. And although the book remains well-balanced, it almost never, ever funny.

Without humor, or anything resembling a satiric edge, we're left with an earnest sexual/political soap opera in which not much happens. This book feels as if it contains a good story struggling to break free, but it never quite manages to do so.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An example of how connections can get you published, February 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Face-Time: A Novel (Hardcover)

Not witty, not hilarious, not funny (wickedly or otherwise), not believable, not riveting, not thoughtful, not superbly written, not razor-sharp, not savvy, and definitely not worth reading. The prose is plodding. The characters are utterly unsympathetic and unbelievable. The references to Desmond Morris, Casablanca, etc., are pitiful in their cut and paste awkwardness. And somehow, the plot manages to be both contrived and predictable.

Jim Lehrer, Michael Lewis, Larry Gelbart, Judy Woodruff, Gail Sheehy, and Christopher Hitchens should all be ashamed of lending their good names to the promotion of this dreary dreary book, regardless of how good a friend Tarloff or his wife might be. The only one of of the group that came close to the truth in her jacket blurb was Woodruff. If in calling it the "ultimate Washington novel," she's referring to the fact that in D.C, too often who you know is more important than what you know, then she's right on the money.