Powertown - Hardcover

Lind, Michael

3

5 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060175109 ISBN 13: 9780060175108

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1996

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A nationally known political pundit delivers his first work of fiction, a portrayal of the struggle for power in Washington, D.C., where a burst of violence brings together the city's diverse characters. A first novel. 40,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo. Tour.

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Review:

Michael Lind is a Washington insider who in 1994 famously announced in clarion tones his conversion from conservative to liberal, promptly becoming an accomplished polemicist against the agenda of the right. His last book was a serious work of political analysis; now he follows with a novel satirizing the inside-the-beltway world he knows so well. Lind's title is somewhat ironic, for his characters are in the lower echelons of the capitol's hierarchy: Stef Schonfeld is a journalist at a political monthly; Evander Johnson is a young black teenage gang wannabe; Ross Drummond is a gay Republican lobbyist. Lind's story has the ring of truth.

From the Publisher:

In his fiction debut, Michael Lind, America's most respected and controversial young political pundit and visionary, delivers a searing portrait of life in our nation's capital, a story of the merciless struggle for influence -- and survival.

Only a few blocks beyond the brilliant marble monuments, only a few steps behind the most powerful of Washington's elite, a whole, nearly hidden world exists -- a world where high-profile fixers reign supreme while low-level bureaucrats jockey for Beltway "McJobs" and the city's impoverished slide further into squalor. Powertown follows a range of characters separated by endless differences and yet connected by the most spidery of threads -- a lobbyist, a programmer for NPR, a journalist, a drug czar's flunky, a private security guard, a Salvadoran maid and a teenage gangsta -- as they are borne along a shifting and potentially calamitous current until their destinies converge in a shocking flare-up of violence.

With the gritty realism of Richard Price's Clockers and the barbed satire of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, Michael Lind lays bare the muscles and tendons beneath the polished, partisan faces Washington likes to present.

Michael Lind is the author of Up from Conservation and The Next American. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, formerly senior editor at The New Republic and Harper's Magazine and executive editor of The National Interest. He lives in New York City.

"Michael Lind rescues Washington from schlock. This is an intelligent, ambitious book -- a novel with big shoulders. But it's also something even more rare: a truly political novel with heart and style. Don't miss it."--Peter Blauner, author of The Intruder and Slow Motion Riot

"Gay staffers, anti-prohibitionist drug cops, Salvadoran domestics, black lyricists... these, too, live 'inside the Beltway,' though you would never know it. Michael Lind does know it and has made a dashing tale out of it. He is rewriting the Washington novel."--Christopher Hitchens, author of Blood, Class and Nostalgia

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