Big business turned to Republican Wade Hoak to keep the United States on track, and for three years as president that's just what he's done. But "when it's not depressing or frightening," he says, "being president is just annoying. I'm tired of meeting Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and Olympic heroes and people with diseases. I live in a fishbowl and I'm surrounded by Secret Service agents. I have to wear a bulletproof vest that makes me sweat like a pig. I have to fly everywhere and you know how I hate that. I've forgotten how to balance my checkbook, and how to light a barbecue. I'm sixty-two years old and, frankly, I don't need it." So he quits.
Shortly afterward, a geology professor with a fellowship to work as an aide to a congressional committee is handed a loser issue--a call for increased daylight saving time--and somehow manages to keep falling upward. Another congressional aide befriends Rep. Senior Younger Jr., 114 years old and ready to be a congressman forever: "I don't want to live in a home, so I'd better stay here." Behind the farcical plotting, Ev Ehrlich gets in some savagely funny digs at the deal brokering and image management that make up American politics in the 1990s. Big Government is a brisk, entertaining romp that leaves the reader eager for more. --Ron Hogan
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
To say that Clinton White House veteran Erlich's characters are cardboard is not a criticism: this debut novel, a rollicking parody of current American political life, works like a puppet show. The Being There plot follows the elevation of naive incompetents through the self-serving machinations of soulless politicos. Many of the scenes are brilliantly absurd, as when one Senator Moss is eaten by an alligator while wooing a militant naturalist for campaign support, or when the campaign staff of ailing Senator Wheezle restricts media access because being in a coma "is usually perceived as a negative." There are hilarious lampoons of political double-think, e.g., the "universal daylight savings time initiative," a pork barrel for the electric companies, and the "equipment that doesn't work tax credit," baldly subsidizing businesses for giving away things they never needed in the first place. All the men in power speak like the puppet Punch, unashamedly full of themselves, generally to hilarious effect. ("No, it's absolutely legal," says one, "and we can always give the money back if we're caught.") On the other hand, Ehrlich is given to excessive exposition and summary narrative, as if he doubted the readers' ability to appreciate the satire in the action itself. Some interior monologues militate against the total effect, and, because the characters are so thin, it's sometimes too easy to confuse them for one another as the novel jumps from one crazy subplot to another. In the last few pages, Ehrlich tries to draw an uplifting moral that is not at all warranted by the horrific picture he has painted: everyone is for sale, and only fools and losers have scruples. Author tour; simultaneous Time Warner audio.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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