Getting It Right: A Novel (Hardcover)

I was disappointed that Mr. Buckley did not seem to conduct the level of research one would except from someone of his stature. The number of inacuracies about Mormons and Utah is surprising. Couldn't he get a NR intern to do some basic fact checking? Some things are minor like his mentioning the University of Salt Lake City which does not exist, or that Woodroe is from a town north of the Salt Lake. Look at a map, there are no towns on the north end of the Great Salt Lake.

Most incredible are the situations he puts Woodroe in early in the book when he is serving as a missionary. LDS missionaries always work and travel in pairs, but Buckley totally ignores this basic tenant so he can get his main character into situations that would not happen to a normal missionary.

Later in the book it turns out that Woodroe is not all that commited to his faith. Buckley could have developed his character better to show why this happened.

I am not as familiar with the other institutions that he tackles in the book (The JBS and Ayn Rand) but if he was as sloppy in representing them as he was the Mormons than there is probably more fiction in this work than meets the eye.

During this era, Buckley, Russell Kirk, Whitaker Chambers, and others were defining, in the pages of National Review, the parameters of conservatism as we understand it today. In so doing, they strove to establish their breed of conservatism as the dominant ideology of anti-Communism, while such firebrands as Ayn Rand and the John Birch Society's Robert Welch adopted a fiercer, more confrontational demeanor. /Getting it Right/ is Buckley's account of how Rand and Welch estranged themselves from the emerging conservative silent majority. Buckley is fair to both and displays a keen understanding of how Rand and Welch each captivated their respective sects. Presently, Rand's legacy is more enduring and I expect that Buckley's portrayal of Rand as a shrew who may have "created an entire . . . philosophical system[] to deal with her own psychological problems" will earn this book hysterical reproachment from those who still adopt Rand's "Objectivism" and style themselves Randian heroes. But Buckley has in no sense whatsoever adopted the Aaron Sorkin model of political fiction wherein one makes ideological opponents look silly by putting words in their mouths that they would never speak. Buckley clearly acknowledges Rand's literary brilliance and her gift for rigorous analytical deduction. He uses her personal implosion as an object lesson in how the most studious fidelity to capitalism and freedom cannot yield genuine happiness without a corresponding commitment to the traditional social virtues.

But did this have to be a novel? Not until the final pages will readers develop much affection for the major fictional characters, each of whom serves as little more than a deus ex machina to hurry along the narrative. The author was a major participant in many of the events chronicled, and history would have been better served by a well-documented first-person account than by a half-fictionalization in which Buckley at times clumsily renders himself as a supporting character. The novel's copious citations to National Review editorials also harmonize rather poorly with its literary form. Yet the struggle for the soul of American conservatism does have the character of an epic. The drama reaches its crescendo at the 1964 Republican National Convention when a defiant Barry Goldwater declares, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." By itself, the sentiment was and is beautiful, but Buckley places it in context, and, as always, stands athwart history, yelling Stop.

As a political activist whose views have been described as "extreme right-wing" (although I would argue that the Libertarian party annoys the Left and the Right more or less equally), I am naturally interested in how the American Right evolved, from the beginning of the Cold War to the present. It was for that reason--and not, Lord knows, because I expected any stylistic treatthat I looked forward to reading "Getting It Right." Unfortunately, as is usually the case with Mr. Buckley's historical fiction, the book would have been far more interestingindeed potentially a classichad the author presented it as non-fiction, either history or personal memoir. As fiction, this book is a bit of a snore.

Mr. Buckley just can't write fiction very well. I would guess that this is because he doesn't ask to be coached, and none of his circle dares coach him unbidden, and in any case his novels sell well enough regardless of their literary quality. His fansof which I am one, when he sticks to journalism and criticismlive in hope where his fiction is concerned. However, I have finally given way to despair.

"Getting It Right" gives us a terrific subject: the story of how two very different "right-wing" movementsthe anti-Communist John Birch Society and the "objectivist" cult of Ayn Randdiverged and sometimes co-operated and between them pretty well destroyed the possibility of a libertarian revolution, leaving the United States to degenerate into the authoritarian collectivist society it has become.

The book is also blessed with a strong cast of historical characters: the imperious Miss Rand; the ever-more-paranoid Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society); Welch's ally, the bizarre Gen. Edwin Walker; the anti-Communist academic Revilo Oliver; self-help guru Nathaniel Branden; Sen. Barry Goldwater; cameo appearances by John and Robert Kennedy and Earl Warren.

Unfortunately, the subject matter and the historical charactersthe most interesting components of the bookare treated with an almost insulting superficiality. The author spends far too much time on a fictional protagonist, Woodroe Raynor, whose background is so improbable as to make the reader roll his eyes almost immediately: a Mormon missionary, not yet 20 years old, he is miraculously caught up in the Hungarian revolt of 1956, an event that convinces him of the inherent evil of Communism. His romantic interest (if you can call it that) throughout the book is a Randian acolyte: Leonora Goldstein, the idealistic daughter of refugees from Hitler's depredations. The woodenness, the utter lack of emotion with which these two approach their relationship (which begins in the late 1950s and culminates in their engagement at the end of the book, in the mid-1960s) is quite illustrative of Mr. Buckley's chief flaw as a novelist: his apparent discomfort with anything to do with "feelings."

I sometimes criticize writers (women writers in particular) for being overly occupied with the illustration of emotion, but Mr. Buckley goes to the other extreme. He acknowledges that people feel this way or that way, and admits somewhat grudgingly that people have sexual intercourse, but he's most reluctant to go any farther than that. In his rather sketchy illustration of the relationship between Woodroe and Leonora, one sees little or no affection, and certainly no passion. They behave to each other more like an undemonstrative but secretly incestuous brother and sister than like a courting couple.

Even more egregious is Mr. Buckley's description (or nondescription) of the sexual liaisons between Miss Rand and her sometime heir apparent, Branden. Such an affair did, notoriously, take place, but it's difficult to form an original movie, in one's mind's eye, of what the postmenopausal and emphatically hideous Miss Rand must have looked like, with her clothes off, doing the nasty with a chap some 30 years her junior. A gruesomely detailed written descriptionand we all know how funny Mr. Buckley can be, when he wants to bewould not have gone unappreciated. An even greater challenge for the author, which Mr. Buckley likewise shirks, would have been to make the reader understand why a young man might want to swyve the aging diva of objectivism in the first place.

In describing the end of their affair, Mr. Buckley commits one of the most elementary errors of fiction-writing. Here is how he describes her reaction to Branden's decision to end their sexual relationship:

"Nathaniel had seen her cross before. He had seen her critical. But he had not seen her uncontrollably, titanically, murderously angry. It was like a great tidal wave smashing everything in its path, including skyscrapers, the white cliffs of Dover, and the Maginot Line. When finally he escaped upstairs to Barbara, they wept together. But before they had come near to exhausting their reserves of mutual consolation, the telephone rang, and lo! it was Ayn. She wanted to speak with Barbara.

"She did so at great length. Any told how she had misestimated Barbara's husband. She had thought him a true man, on the scale of the great men she had created in fiction. He was less than that. Far less. He was despicable."

Any graduate assistant English instructor at any college in the United States would have handed that passage back to Mr. Buckley with the sharp admonition, "Show me, don't tell me!" Unfortunately, just as no friend of Barbra Streisand or Tim Robbins or Ed Asner is going to tell them that their political views are wrongheaded, no friend of Mr. Buckley's is likely to presume to teach him how to write fiction. Thus his next novel, if there is a next, is certain to be yet another exercise in half-assedness.

--Joseph Dobrian