The Librarian

As a librarian and a liberal conspiracy theorist, I found The Librarian gratifying from page one. I stayed up reading until 5 am and then woke up three hours later to finish it. That hasn't happened to me in years. David Goldberg is a university librarian working part-time for an elderly conservative billionaire whose co-conspirators are worried that Goldberg will find evidence of their plans to steal the presidential election. With shifting viewpoints, Beinhart does a great job of capturing the mindset of a librarian, with his literary allusions and idealistic worldview, as well as the many crazies out to get him. There is an Oliver North/Gordon Liddy goon, an amoral Secretary of State reminiscent of Dick Cheney and a Supreme Court justice on the take. On the good guy's side -- quirky librarians out of their element as violent thugs begin to move in. Librarians are, by definition, at least a little idealistic which, in these corrupt times, puts them at a bit of a disadvantage; but they are also bright truth-seeking information technologists, so they're not exactly helpless either, and the confrontations between the two groups are believable in this fictional account. Beinhart has a disconcerting talent for making sense of present and past political machinations, harkening back to Ronald Reagan, Ken Starr and the 2000 election as well as our current crop of ne'er-do-wells, positing plausible surmises about what their motives and actions are. I hope this gets made into a movie, as the author's American Hero was. Part of the fun is trying to decide who will play the various parts. One character I found particularly interesting was Hagopian, the Democratic candidate's political and media guru. I'm not sure who the real-life counterpart would be, but would love to know. The verbal description of the president is absolutely hysterical and point after point deliciously skewers hypocritical chicken hawks and government employees who bash the government at every turn, including a "pugnacious pest exterminator"! It is wonderfully funny, though the fact that it is largely true also makes it infuriating. The dedication to librarian Larry Berk, "whom God has mistaken for Job", was intriguing, particularly when Berk appears briefly in the book. I thought the ending was a bit unsatisfactory (it wrapped up too quickly and we didn't hear from candidate Murphy or guru Hagopian in the last third of the book) and it could have used a better proofreading, but this book brought me hours of pleasure. I had to make a real effort not to read too many passages aloud to my husband so he can enjoy it on his own. Highly recommended.

I can understand why supporters of the Bush administration would be infuriated by this book. But if you're an independent or a democrat who likes political thrillers and doesn't feel that your own beliefs and hypocrisies are being savaged, then this page-turner will keep you thoroughly engaged and annoy the hell out of whoever else is in the room when you interrupt to read passages aloud. Much of the plot action requires a suspension of disbelief (as with most thrillers, I think), but the politically related commentary is as scary as. . . well, Wolfowitz or Cheney or the prez's faith-based foreign policy. Despite a somewhat weak ending, I found this book to be terrifically entertaining.

What if John Kerry wins not only the popular vote, but the Electoral College vote as well? Will Dubya and his band of neo-con merry men actually leave the White House on January 21, 2005? Time will tell. In Larry Beinhart's extremely entertaining book The Librarian, we're presented with a story that has them trying to stay. Unfortunately, the book requires little suspension of disbelief - many of the characters only slight caricatures of real people - one can look at today's headlines and see the building blocks of a right-wing putsch, and Beinhart puts them in a fast-paced, easy to read, almost action novel. His earlier book American Hero was adapted into the movie Wag the Dog, which seemed prescient when Clinton rocketed Somalia and Afghanistan. This book, despite it's commercial fiction genre, is also uncomfortably believable. There is one major scene in the book involving a stud farm that seems too much like Thomas Wolfe's Man in Full to me, but it does serve to tie the story together imaginatively.

I read the galleys of "The Librarian" in August 2004 and it absorbed me completely: ten minutes before 5 am, having started the previous evening I finally finished it (needless to say, not my best day at work followed 2 hours later). What struck me in a similar way than Beinhart's previous book, "American Hero", was his interweaving of facts any alert newspaper reader could have seen with a high paced fictional plot. The readers' problem of course is to sort the tales from the facts, and I so wished for footnotes (as used in American Hero). But how lucid, plausible and prescient Beinhart's novel really is became apparent when on September 7 Vice President Cheney did exactly what Beinhart's has his fictitional Republican administration do: proclaiming that if a Democrat is elected the US would face the threat of another terrorist attack. I'll wager that Beinhart didn't just get lucky: here's a writer with a very keen observation using the lower threshold of proof afforded to fiction writers to illuminate what the Bush administration (or any highly ideological ruling elite) is capable of. Beinhart's "Librarian" takes the gloves off. Personally, I found some of the violence described somewhat off-putting at first - until I remembered how Black Panthers were assassinated by police, how civil rights leaders were targeted then and are still now under new Patriot Act legislation. Under the democratic veneer power politics takes rather unpleasant forms. On the more civil side readers will take away at least one excellent reminder, and a term to help remembering it for future reference: Early on Larry Beinhart introduces the memorable concept of the Fog Fact: open secrets that ought to be public knowledge and for which conclusive evidence has long since been presented but which still remain unsaid. Such as the fact that joining the National Guard was one of the methods for avoiding being sent into combat in Vietnam: not "patriotic service" but effective draft dodging. Anyway, during those last weeks in the current presidential race I'll be curious to see whether the Democrats take some of the strategies employed by Beinhart's fictional Dems - that we'll see more of the more or less criminal moves by Goebbels' eager student Karl Rove is pretty much a given. Read the book and place your own bets on how or whether this election (again) will be stolen. Martin Voelker