Perfect Pitch

Journalists tend to be odd ducks. Don’t be misled by the TV talking heads with opinions bow-tied and hair poofed up, looking slick and sensible. Real reporters know that the news business is far from clean and neat; they thrive on disaster, death, disappointment, divorce and dismemberment as the stuff that sells newspapers.

Before the pompous predictors and post-graduate prognosticators convince us that journalism isn’t a trade but a profession, “The Sun King” arrives, a terrific novel that reminds journalists (and the rest of the reading world) what the news biz is really all about.

Not since Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” has anyone so cleverly captured the essence of newspapering--the madness and delight of killer editors, tin-eared copy editors, complaining advertisers and ulcer-producing deadlines that allow a bundle of newsprint to fall finally kerplunk on a soggy front lawn and prompt one half of a couple to tell the other, “Darling, I’ve seen something interesting in the paper this morning.”

Not that it’s all about newspapers. “The Sun King” is also a swell Washington, D.C., novel, a good albeit mildly yuppified romance (all points of the romantic triangle are, sadly, from Harvard) and wonderful proof that novels about morals and manners aren’t filed only under Austen or Wharton. For the anxious rich out there, on the north 40 or north of Sunset, who perhaps might become part of the power establishment in this capital of arrivistes, it is an excellent primer on social advancement.

The novel’s narrator, David Cantor, is a Harvard degree gone bad, ill-suited as the editor of a mildly read social rag, where he writes “about the A’s, for the B’s.” He carries a barely flickering undergraduate torch for one Candace Ridgeway, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign editor of the fictional Washington Sun.

Both Cantor and Candace have the social chromosome so often missing among reporters, which produces the consistent irony of the business: pudgy sports reporters who can’t throw a ball; society columnists who are frequently unpleasant and unsocial; political reporters who couldn’t get their own vote. Trained observers, they comment on the failures and successes of more apt devotees but never play the game themselves.

As do many reporters who admittedly lurk at the edge of life, Cantor precisely measures and classifies others’ success, even the much-admired Candace’s: “[T]here was an assumption that what she did mattered. Part of it was that she was openly ambitious.” Cantor’s controlled life changes when he crosses tangents with golden billionaire Carl Sandberg Galvin, who’s come to Washington to buy love, influence and whatever else is generally lying around.

The rich man as operator is familiar to Cantor, who’s seen similar social flotsam make appearances in D.C., “men who had just sold the family department store chain or real estate business to set themselves up as problem solvers, party givers, candidates for ambassadorial posts in northern latitudes.” Cantor gives fair warning, with dead-on accuracy: Don’t take that ambassadorship in Tiki-Tiki. Northern latitudes is where the power lies.

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In Galvin, Cantor’s found a unique specimen, “the man for this season. It’s said that George Washington was an inevitable choice to become our first president because no one had ever looked better riding a horse. There was something of that same inevitability about Galvin.” (I am uncertain if anyone ever said that about George Washington, but Ignatius has every other element of Washington down so pat I am afraid to question this single quip.)

Galvin’s only mistake might be that he buys the Sun and plays out his power game as its publisher (very definitely not the Post, the author’s employer). Galvin’s newspaper is a Murdochian contest-holding, front page-editorializing whiz-bang operation in which news reporting takes a back seat to circulation-driven gimmickry.

The love interest here, on which the plot and Ignatius’ world turn, is the Sun, and Ignatius is pitch-perfect, putting the reader either in the middle of a city room or in the center of a reporter’s psyche. The triumph of objective reporting means the destruction of some basic human instincts--good reporters don’t let their feelings get in the way of a good story, as Cantor finds out: “I would have resolved that night to do something about my own loneliness and isolation. But I was a journalist, so I decided to commission a story.”

That’s it. Understand that and just skip the Annenberg School. That’s journalism, like a giant lemon Tootsie Pop, all mixed-up sweetness and sadness and a glorious lump of chocolaty truth, wrapped in the flimsy but abiding love-hate relationship between reporters and their newspapers. “Journalists are sentimentalists,” Cantor warns. “They’re always ready to sing ‘La Marseillaise.’ ”

It’s the nature and the nurture of a city room--high-minded, impractical, virtuous. Listen to the purity of Cantor’s editor as he makes sure a controversial story gets printed: “The mayor is a crack-head and a convicted felon, but even if he were a saint, [killing a story about him] would still be wrong. Newspapers don’t get in bed with city governments.”

For all the aspiring and recovering journalists out there, for anybody who reads newspapers and wonders what it would be like to be a reporter, to utter the sacred words, “Sweetheart, get me rewrite”--don’t.

Just get into bed with “The Sun King.” No rewrite required.