Sen. Boxer’s novel initiative

WHEN I was handed this book -- Sen. Barbara Boxer’s first novel -- one flaming question wrote itself across my brain: Is she up for reelection?

Because if she is, I thought, the Republicans are going to shred her like a ball of mozzarella. Her book could read like a hybrid of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Da Vinci Code,” with all royalties going to the Mom and Apple Pie League, and the right-wingers would still yammer on about her neglecting the people’s business, all the time dreaming of bidding adios Sen. Boxer, hello Sen. Schwarzenegger, a man who outsourced his prose -- his columns for bodybuilding magazines -- to ghostwriters.

But the California Democrat isn’t up for reelection, and her novel, “A Time to Run,” isn’t “Huck Finn” or “The Da Vinci Code.” It is a passable political thriller of wishful thinking and wish fulfillment -- Capitol Hill intrigue with the good guys (Boxer’s Dems) winning. My wish fulfillment would have been reading it without knowing who wrote it -- like a blind wine-tasting -- but without Boxer’s name on the cover, would it have been reviewed at all?

Boxer took seven years to write the book -- on D.C.-to-California flyovers of America, which is probably the perfect venue for reading it. Given this, the coincidence of her plot to the Harriet E. Miers mess in the search for a successor to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is sheer serendipity. To be fair, only a Dickens could have dreamed up Miers -- think of Uriah Heep in a turquoise Talbot’s suit.

“A Time to Run” opens with a liberal freshman California senator battling almost single-handedly to stop an uber-conservative woman Supreme Court nominee. The senator, Ellen Fischer, gets ammo to take down the nominee from Greg, an old friend and lover who’s also a political antagonist evidently trying to make amends. What to do?

Thereafter the book is told in flashback to arrive at the here and now. It recounts the life of Ellen, the “feisty” (a word that in newspeak always means “short and plucky”) and politically ardent UC Berkeley student who befriends two Big Men on Campus. She has a brief fling with one of them, Greg, but marries the other, Josh Fischer.

Together the Fischers pursue activist careers on behalf of the downtrodden and neglected, while Greg, undone by the temptations of luxury and his contempt for the less fortunate, becomes the tool of his rich father-in-law’s right-wing agenda. When Josh runs for Senate, their erstwhile friend becomes the instrument for Josh’s untimely death. Ellen is drafted to run in his place, and wins -- to the fury of Greg’s patrons, who are determined to bring her down too.

Part of the fun of a book like this is having plot twists jump out of nowhere and surprise you. That’s why they call them thrillers, not yawners. I am particularly and pleasurably rotten at anticipating plot twists and am always flummoxed by people who pay $25 to play Outwit the Author. But here I really did see a lot of the twists coming, including the MacGuffin, as Hitchcock called the gimmick that drives a story. I expect that’s because Boxer’s book is grounded in political realities that attentive newspaper readers will recognize.

Certainly her sets are authentic -- funky Washington restaurants and the hidey-hole offices each senator is assigned. It offers the fun of figuring out who the characters really are: Who is the model for the courtly, old-school Republican Sen. Osmond Ford, who seems to care about ethics and honor? And who is the incumbent who hisses to Ellen on the Capitol steps, “You know you only got elected because that son-of-a-bitch husband of yours died at just the right time!” -- the cartoonishly evil Carl Satcher? In case the message didn’t get through, Ellen reminds another character that Satcher is one of those people who “is not concerned with the rights of the people; he’s motivated purely by personal greed.”

Obviously a book by a liberal senator would cast Republicans as the bad guys, but somehow, the women of either political stripe wind up coming off better than the men. Boxer’s Supreme Court nominee, though philosophically despicable to Ellen, can be prevailed on to do the right thing. Ellen’s executive aide, a survivor of the Oakland streets, is cannier than her boss.

This isn’t autobiography -- Boxer wrote hers years ago -- but the kind of novel that professionals write when they want to transcend the limits of their professions to tell -- and control -- some meta-truth beyond an accretion of facts. Newt Gingrich, a devoted historian, has written novels of alternative reality about the outcome of the Civil War. Dan Quayle’s wife, Marilyn, co-wrote with her sister a novel about a Republican senator much maligned by the press and liberals. Maybe they figured that by making their hero a bootstrapping black man from Georgia, instead of a rich, twinkly-eyed Indiana blond, that nobody would make the connection. I’m still wondering what to make of Second Lady Lynne Cheney’s “Sisters,” a 19th century frontier tale of murder, lesbianism and feminism.

My journalistic colleagues, anxious that they may find themselves written out and out-written by pro politicians turned amateur writers, can rest easy. Washington’s fiction machine can never ever catch up with the stupefying facts it generates every astonishing day.