Bad Publicity

by Jeffrey Frank

Book Overview

In the twilight of the Reagan era, as prospects appear brighter than ever for a Democratic restoration, the lawyers, lobbyists, advisers and socialites of Washington are looking ahead -- but over their shoulders, too. With good reason.
Charlie Dingleman, a former congressman, has gotten a tantalizing job offer that could rescue him from the drudgery of lawyering. But he's being shadowed by an increasingly unsavory rumor started by Judith Grust,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743247809
• ISBN13: 9780743247801
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A Cold, Cruel World

Jeffrey Frank is a brilliant novelist specializing in acid portraits of a totally loveless world, one in which people bump into each other but never connect--either emotionally or sexually. In a Frank novel one always feels that one is observing the world through the wrong end of a telescope; the characters are infinitely distant from us, and from the narrator. We identify with these characters only at our own risk. Frank has for some reason disowned his own early novel, *The Creep*, which I recall (very well) reading in high school, circa 1968. This novel is in the same mold; the only difference is in the specificity of the portrayal of the Washington D.C. lobbyist/think tank/legal milieu. But the utter alienation of the male characters, and the frigid but caustically funny style through which they are depicted, remains unchanged. If you enjoyed, or were obsessed by, *The Creep*, check out this novel; it's like meeeting a dysfunctional friend, 30+ years later, and finding out where he's been.

Funniest book ever on our train-wreck national dialectic

In the last weeks of the Reagan administration, clueless ex-congressman Charles Dingleman, dumped by his district's voters and by two ex-wives, is now floundering in a private sector law firm. A ray of hope arrives in the form of a possible appointment to the prospective Dukakis White House. But over lunch, Dingleman offends an over-reactive young associate, Judith Grust--first by leering at an underdressed woman, then unaccountably trying to recover via a piece of movie repartee that once worked out great between Broderick Crawford and Virginia Mayo. (If I were a dog and you were a steak, I wouldn't care, Dingleman remembers the line--"or something to that effect.") Dingleman's bungled rendition is actually even worse than that (I worry that if I were a mangy dog and you were roast beef. . .). Worse still is how Judith's ear memorializes it ("Something about raw meat"). She complains to an inept founding partner, whose reflex for putting out the fire is to lie to her that Dingleham knows he has a disorder and is getting treatment for it. Grust, though, is still haunted by the violation she's been through, and convinces herself that in the national interest she must forward the information to network news anchor Reynolds Mund. (The dull welfare reformer she's begun dating, while gazing at Judith's bare upper leg, agrees to make the actual phone call.) Dingleman is soon a jobless pariah, and enlists the blundering, high-priced publicity firm Big Tooth to restore his good name. The locus of this firm brings into play a whole third-person world of losers and climbers, all fatally human, many of whom will eventually fail upward in what seems to be a sort of train-wreck historical dialectic. ("Put the lazy bastards to work is my thought," Dingleman eventually says about welfare reform, and the former liberal theorist he's talking to feels "a sort of primal agreement.") Everyone is basically in over his head; everyone but Dingleman bluffs having slightly more connections than he really does. Poor slobs are undone by their concealed masturbation fantasies--and in a different book we would feel that a brave, timely statement about forgiveness, hypocrisy and human nature might be made. The book's only frustration is that Frank's comedy is so smart, one suspects this could have been just as funny and possibly more serious as well. The farce is all too believable, and the humanity Frank draws with his left hand is better than most of us could do with our right. But the book pulls up somewhat abruptly, in a world that bumbles forward without real breakthroughs or breakdowns. Frank's voice is acid but somehow weirdly sympathetic. Each biographical sketch lingers on the perfect note of self-importance, each physical description contains the perfect repellant flaw. The Russian Expert Suzanne Smule "smiled a wonderful smile, and Hank understood her charm at once. She wore a dark green suit loose enough to hide her stocky body. She was also

STAYED AWAKE, LAUGHING IN BED

I lived in Washington D.C. once upon a time, but that --- or the fact that I was once married to a washed up politico -- has absolutely nothing to do with why I LOVED this hilarious novel. Well, perhaps a tiny bit. But personal experience of the various and dreadful games in the Nation's Capital, or even your basic lobbying law firm, isn't necessary in order to enjoy this wicked, wicked book. You'll scream with laughter. I did.