What I Am Reading: "Big Ugly" by William F. Weld
This, the second and last Terry Mullally novel, is a Washington Novel, Bill Weld’s Advise and Consent. Admittedly, the comparison doesn’t hold up as well as it does between Mackerel by Moonlight and The Last Hurrah; partially because this novel, unlike Drury’s is much faster, lighter, and punchier.
Once again, the novel doesn’t doesn’t quite have a full narrative arc, and there is a little bit of half-deux ex machina involved in the plot’s resolution. This resolution could be taken as a cliffhanger, or could not: Terry Mullally has his legal issues resolved (including some new ones that have been written into his backstory since the last book) by virtue of having been invited into the right room by a bigger fish, and put in the prime position of being able to do that bigger fish a favor. The problem is that the mess he can clean up for the fish is entirely of her own making, and only needed to be made if she was setting a very elaborate trap, a point that is not, in my estimation, implied.
Back to the beginning, though. First in Terry’s meander is a screw-up: he backs the losing candidate for Senate Majority Leader in a way that is designed to give insult to the winning candidate. He ingratiates himself with the winner, however, by bonding over outdoorsy stuff at the winner, Senator Anson Vivian, at the latter’s mountain holler retreat, Big Ugly, West Virginia. Besides, Vivian needs his legal advice: the Senate is considering investigation of the President’s shady associates, and Mullally is, of course, a former prosecutor. Investigation builds upon investigation on both or all sides of the political divide, rendering Mullally’s and Weld’s prosecutorial background useful once again.
Mullally is a fairly static character as a cosmopolitan semi-rogue (fortunately not a bumpkin fish out of water, which is of course a classic Washington Novel option); but Weld keeps him interesting by rendering him unable to say no when the other big-shot Senator, Happy Gilliam, one-eighth Native American resident of the Texas Panhandle, tries to get him in on the same shady kickbacks that he and some members of the administration enjoy. That leaves Mullally in hot water as he must deal with being a subject of interest in the federal investigation of both that and his previous Boston and New York shenanigans, both of which are overseen by the appointees of the Vice President, ambitious and rogue Martha Holloway, eager to betray her own (Republican) running mate. She is the aforementioned big fish, and as it transpires at the end, she has the ability to scratch Terry’s back legally if he scratches hers. Did she make herself vulnerable to lay a trap and draw out her intra-Administration enemies, to destroy them? Perhaps only in my estimation.
The book is well-written, but all of these things just kind of…happen. Terry just rolls from one situation to the next, sometimes improving his position, sometimes slipping. As I said, the end could be a cliffhanger, as he looks to next steps in the Holloway administration. Weld, however, presumably became bored of writing novels, just as he became bored of being the Governor of Massachusetts.
A couple of interesting notes - Weld did at least make one character retroactively gay in this one, so that is progress. There is also far less Asian organized crime, though one criminal going off to spend his life in solitary confinement in China is treated as a positive outcome. I also think that Weld must have been the Notes and Comment editor of a law journal at some point, because two minor-to-mid-level characters explicitly have this note on their resume (one is Phil Vacco, Mullally’s former opponent-cum-BFF who has been promoted to the U.S. Attorneyship). These are my stray observations that I could not fit in the summary otherwise.
As indicated, I liked these novels. They are quick and easy to read, and a lot of events and minor details scream out that they were funny anecdotes from Weld’s own career. I would read more of them if they existed, but the seventeen-year gap renders that prospect unpromising. Oh well. They put me back in the #MApoli zone.