Advise and Consent.

“If you do that you won’t be liked,” a fatherly fellow Senator had advised him on some controversial matter soon after he arrived. “I don’t give a damn about being liked,” he had retorted impatiently, “but I sure as hell intend to be respected.”

Allen Drury’s dry political thriller Advise and Consent, winner of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is set in an alternate universe where the Senate gives careful and thorough consideration to a candidate for a Cabinet post who is nominated by a bullying coward of a President. It’s a quaint novel, built on the extraordinary idea of a Senator standing on principle, even when opposing his own party, for the good of the country. It’s also too long by half and might be the most blatantly white male-centric Pulitzer winner I’ve read, without a single female character of any merit whatsoever in its 600-plus pages.

Drury never mentions political parties in the novel, instead simply casting them as the Majority and the Minority, with the President, also never named, in the Majority party. The novel revolves around the President’s nomination of Bob Leffingwell, a dove on relations with Russia, to be his new Secretary of State, casting aside the current occupant of the position as too hawkish. The book’s four main sections each focus on one participant in the deliberations over Leffingwell – the Majority Leader, Bob Munson; a longstanding Minority Senator, Seab Cooley; a young Majority Senator from Utah with a secret in his past, Brigham Anderson; and Orrin Knox of Illinois, the idealized Senator who is faced with a choice between the Right Thing and his own Presidential aspirations. Each character is richly drawn in two dimensions – we get a tremendous amount of detail, including biographies of each from childhood, so much of it unnecessary – but lacks the real complexity of actual people.

Over the course of the first half of the book, the accusation that Leffingwell was once a member of a communist discussion group comes to light, is disproven, then resurfaces, and the second time the news gets to Sen. Anderson, who had a brief affair with another man while serving in the Navy in World War II in Honolulu. Now married with a young daughter, from the conservative state of Utah, Anderson is an easy mark for blackmail, and when information on his dalliance comes to the hands of the President, he has no compunction about using it. (The entire episode is modeled after the true story of Sen. Lester Hunt, who killed himself in his Senate office after colleagues tried to blackmail him over the arrest of his son for soliciting sex with an undercover officer.) The consequences of this extortion attempt put Leffingwell’s merits on the back burner and put his opponents, including Sen. Knox, in direct conflict with the President, who refuses to withdraw his candidate even with the evidence of his previous flirtations with communism known to him.

The book is as slow as it sounds; Drury’s pace is leisurely and his sentences tediously long. It’s not a book of action, but it’s also not a book of much dialogue, either, which slows its pace further and left me wondering how Drury intended to push the plot forward. There are maybe a half-dozen memorable scenes in the book – the first hearing where Leffingwell confronts his accuser and the resolution of Brigham Anderson’s section come to mind – and far too much time showing the Senators spending time with their generic wives or chatting with the stereotyped ambassadors from India, Russia, France, and England. The backroom dealing that determines the fate of the candidate should be front and center, but Drury distracts the reader from the good stuff too often.

Anderson’s story could have been the center of a better, if less ambitious, novel, but would never have seen the light of day in 1960. As it is, Drury evinces some empathy for his character, but every discussion of his past transgression is in the light of what a terrible sin it was, even beyond what it might have meant for the character’s political career. It doesn’t make the book flawed – every work of art should be evaluated at least in part based on the time in which it was created – but it does make it seem very dated.

There’s also a lot of setup here for future books, ones Drury did eventually write, that brings nothing to the table in this one – notably the marriage between the children of two of the Senators in the story and the decision by that son to begin his own political career. It’s all prologue but for a book I have no interest in reading, and only served to make this book longer. And if you strip out all this extraneous content I’ve identified here, what are you left with? The story itself is quite thing beyond the Anderson scandal, and that’s the one area where Drury gave us too little verbiage. Add to that the fairy-tale idea of Senators who take their job to evaluate nominees seriously beyond mere partisan rubber-stamping and you get a book that seems to talk about an America that never existed in the first place.

I’m down to eight unread Pulitzer winners, the most recent of which is Mackinlay Kantor’s mammoth 1955 novel Andersonville.

Next up: I’ve got about 100 pages left in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl.