Thirty years old when he won a startling upset victory in his race for U.S. Senator, Mark Coffin was bright, handsome, engagingly idealistic. He believed that honesty and decency would see him through a long and successful political career. His wife, a senator's daughter, should have prepared him better, but even Linda Coffin could not have imagined the intensity of pressure when her husband refused to play by Washington's time-honored rules, or the viciousness when he committed the most unpardonable sin of all: Mark Coffin got caught - with another woman.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not Drury's best,
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This review is from: Mark Coffin U.S.S. (Paperback)
I always enjoy the books of Allen Drury because I enjoy politics in general and I'm a Republican. Drury, of course, wrote exclusively about the men and women of Washington and was unapologetically conservative. There aren't many conservative novelists out there so Drury's books always served as a nice relief but unfortunately, outside of his Advise and Consent series, few of his novels live up to their promise. After winning his pulitzer prize for Advice and Consent, Drury seemed to spend the rest of his career essentially rewriting that book. Mark Coffin, USS is a good example. The novel, from the '70s by which time American politics had changed considerably since Drury wrote his first classic book, deals with California's junior Senator -- the idealistic and niave liberal Mark Coffin. Only thirty years old, Coffin enters the Senate as something of a celebrity and immediately finds himself thrust into a battle over the President's choice for Attorney General. Unfortunately, all of this brings up memories of Advise and Consent's battle over the President's choice for Secretary of State and the comparisons are not favorable. Whereas Advice and Consent was blessed with some very complex characters, Mark Coffin and his fellow Senators all seem to be faded carbon copies of the characters from that earlier book. None of them capture the imagination and most of them are flatly written. Mark Coffin, especially, seems to be compiled of every other young, idealistic politician that has appeared in countless other political novels over the years. As a character, he can't surprise us and as such, his lessons and conflicts simply do not hold the reader's interest. As well, most of the dialouge and scenes seem rather corny at best as if Drury, the '50s political insider, had spent the last twenty years forgetting everything he knew. In the end, Drury seems to be trying to write a novel about the Washington he knew set in the very different, post-Watergate political climate and, as such, comes across as being, for lack of a better term, lost. Still, bizarrely enough, this book is also a rare Drury book that contains a few really sterling and lyrical prose passages as opposed to the somewhat rough, awkwardly constructed sentences he became infamous for in most of his other books. Sadly, one gets the feeling that Drury was making a real effort to craft an important statement with this book (certainly, America needed one at that time). Unfortunately, the times had just passed him by.
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