 Larry Beinhart |
The "October Surprise" scenario - a political hat trick staged during the pre-election countdown to make the incumbent look good - is familiar to most well-informed Americans, but Beinhart has an inside track on the concept; you might say he wrote the book on it. His novel American Hero was the source material for Barry Levinson's 1997 film Wag the Dog, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro. In both works, a floundering president and his spin doctor hire a Hollywood director to stage a war that will spark a media frenzy, ensuring his reelection. But where the Hilary Henken-David Mamet screen adaptation posits a bogus war with Albania, created to rescue a Clintonesque incumbent from a sex scandal, Beinhart's original was even more audacious. The war was the Gulf War, and Beinhart named names. Interwoven with fictional Hollywood characters (and a thicket of libel-avoiding footnotes), American Hero's principal villains were Lee Atwater, James Baker, and the father of our current president.
Fast-forward to a new Bush, and a new Beinhart book. The Librarian is a pitch-black political satire about a hapless academic whose after-hours job, cataloguing the private papers of an arch-conservative billionaire, plunges him into a snakes' nest of presidential dirty tricksters who are masterminding a truly frightening enterprise known only as "Plan One One Three." Call it a November Surprise.
The idea that the electoral vote might be manipulated after a victory by an opposition candidate might have sounded paranoid before the Florida recount and Supreme Court fiascos of the 2000 election, but now it seems alarmingly plausible. Beinhart credits his longtime friend, illustrator Scott Menchin, with the inspiration for The Librarian. At one of their regular tennis games, Menchin commented that the Bush administration wouldn't give up political power even if they lost the election. Beinhart said instantly, "That's the plot of my next novel." He set aside his just-finished manuscript, The Philosopher, and plunged into a writing marathon, hoping to finish - and publish - The Librarian before the 2004 election. It took him about nine months. "Once I've made up my mind what to write about, I work very fast," he says.
The Librarian was the first fiction title published by left-leaning political imprint Nation Books, and quickly became their best-selling title, going into its fourth reprint after only three weeks in print. "In this incredible season of political frenzy, there are only a handful of political novels on the market," says Beinhart, sounding incredulous, if not downright angry, that so few of his colleagues are mining this vein. An essay entitled Politics and Mysteries on his Web site, www.thelibrarian.biz, explains his fixation: "I write about politics because it's the greatest game around and it has the most dead bodies."
The way Beinhart tells it, he emerged from the womb a political animal. "My parents thought of things in terms of political analysis, not psychoanalysis. They grew up in a time when people were making huge political choices, half the world Communist and half Capitalist; they went through the great Fascist/Communist/Capitalist triangle wars. Compared to that, the personality flukes of toilet training and Oedipal impulses seem quite minor."
Beinhart's father was an attorney who wrote for a legal encyclopedia; his mother was an academic administrator. They lived in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, which was then "about 5 percent white." Beinhart learned to fit in. "I didn't get beat up, didn't have the Howard Stern experience. We thought people who lived in the suburbs were pretty weird."
He attended SUNY Binghamton and Stony Brook, where he studied "sex, drugs, cheap thrills, and revolution. It was the sixties." After college, Beinhart worked as a grip and gaffer on film crews, eventually running his own production company. He made commercials, and did radio and television production for political consultant Henry Sheinkopf. And he started writing mystery novels. His debut, No One Rides For Free, won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery; other titles include You Get What You Pay For, Foreign Exchange, and the nonfiction guide How To Write a Mystery.
Beinhart returned to television production about a year ago when he and some poker buddies decided to start their own radio show. "But there's no such thing as Public Access Radio," he explains. So Beinhart signed up for a slot on Woodstock's cable channel 23, and created a bimonthly political talk, comedy, and music show, "In Your Face," which is taped live at the Colony Cafe on alternate Sundays at 10 am.
Typically, a show includes political commentary by Beinhart, live music or comedy, a short film segment produced by writer and actor Gillian Farrell (Beinhart's wife) and Woodstock photographer Dion Ogust, and talk show-style interviews. Recent guests include Congressman Maurice Hinchey, New Paltz Mayor Jason West, Bush on the Couch author Dr. Justin A. Frank, and professional gadflies Mikhail Horowitz and Gilles Malkine. "We get good guests, so we get a good turnout - there's a core audience who come every two weeks no matter what we do, and others who come for the specific speaker. We had hunky young guys showing up for Jason West, Buddhists for Robert Thurman. All the different Woodstocks."
Beinhart attempts to keep regular hours, eating breakfast every morning at Maria's Bazaar before he heads out to the writing studio behind his house. When he sets up an interview appointment, he knows exactly which table he'll occupy, and a steady stream of friends and "In Your Face" watchers drop by to make conversation. He's dressed in tennis shorts and a faded sweatshirt dusted with muffin crumbs. This is precisely the sort of character detail Beinhart eschews. "I don't spend a lot of time on clothing, how people make their eggs in the morning, phone calls from their mother. The fabric of everyday life doesn't interest me. A president wields a giant scythe that swings through the world - it decapitates the guy in the next house and leaves you alone. Maybe you don't even know about it. This guy's head was cut off because of a decision that got made light years away, halfway across the world. That interests me. Politics is one of the fabrics that connects the random events of our lives."
Beinhart may profess to disdain character-revealing details, but his books are full of them: The Librarian's craven billionaire has a soft spot for Rudyard Kipling ballads and an unexpected familiarity with Bob Dylan and Judy Collins lyrics. And the chapter on Character is the longest by far in How To Write a Mystery, followed closely by Plotting.
One character in The Librarian posed a particular challenge for Beinhart. While the inarticulate, privileged good ol' boy Gus W. Scott is a transparent stand-in for George W. Bush, the author was writing his manuscript months before the Democrats chose their candidate. "I was half right - I got the Vietnam vet, but I made my candidate a woman." Beinhart's Anne Lynn Murphy is a smart, media-savvy Congresswoman from Idaho whose heroic record as an Army nurse in Vietnam stands in sharp contrast to the incumbent's wartime draft evasion via a National Guard deferment.
If the victory of a female John Kerry stand-in propels a post-election fiasco in Beinhart's novel, does he think life will imitate art if the actual Kerry "wins huge?" Beinhart ponders a moment. "I think some pretty hysterical things might happen. These are some pretty interesting people - Justin Frank profiles Bush as a classic megalomaniac. The most astounding thing about Bush is his ability to deny any realities or limits. Will whatever that gift is turn into an attempted coup? Will he emerge as God's Chosen, saying, 'God needs me to continue leading America', or will he say, 'Game's up, I'm going home'?" Beinhart shrugs, as if only time can answer his questions.
"In its essence I wrote the book to be apocryphal - an extreme version to illustrate an essential truth: this administration is using terrorism to terrify Americans into voting for them as the people who will protect them, to rally the 'We're at war, we will rally around our leader' nature of human beings. Not just Americans, all human beings. They will crank up the terror thing as high as they feel is necessary. If push comes to shove, if it means having a terror event or an event they can hype as a terror event, I don't doubt they will do it."
Larry Beinhart leans back in his chair and grins, waving as somebody enters. Scott Menchin has just arrived to pick him up for their tennis match. Maybe the plot of Beinhart's next novel is only a backhand away.