That’s still all in good fun, but then the direction went from inward to outward, and raised questions. Steve Almond wrote a flash about Nixon (“Nixon Swims” from his teeny tiny collection This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey) that chokes me up after that, getting me to feel gently towards Reagan is a piece of cake, especially when I struggle with self-image every time I see my Sidney Sheldon novels and police procedural series buried in the most obscure regions of my bookshelves. As I read, Reagan turned into a sympathetic character, a man with a problem just like every other character, a man struggling with self-image vs id. Much of the story is a romp (and great fun at that), but it gradually takes on somber overtones (then again, I can find somber overtones in anything it’s kind of my specialty). And leave it to a slightly wacky writer to force a choice between Blood Meridian and Danielle Steele.
Leave it to a writer to chart a path through a reader’s tastes.
Why he has access to stores of Danielle Steele novels at the Kremlin is not a question you feel comfortable asking, so you turned other topics. Weird, you think, but you think him anyway. He pauses long enough that you begin to wonder if the line has been disconnected when he says, “Maybe I sent her new book too. “Well, as long as it’s not Danielle Steele, that’s fine.” “I must tell you, Ron, that this book is unlike your Louis l’Amour.” “That sounds fine and I’ll look forward to reading it,” you answer in return. “I will send you this book,” Gorbachev tells you over the phone. It is this birthmarked man, Mikhail Gorbachev, apparently a big reader, who suggests you might enjoy reading something other than Louis l’Amour and that there are several American authors he himself reads with regularity, one of whom has penned a new Western. But those are also constraints on the writer the story has to fit public perception, while offering something unexpected.
It’s true that you get most of the character for free, and in this case, setting comes along with it, at least for those of us whose memories go back to the 80s (and we can all be depressed for a moment when we realize not everyone’s does). I would imagine that constructing a fictional story around a well-known real-life personage must be tricky, and the more well-known the personage, the trickier. But be forewarned: fans of Ronald Reagan might not think so. Try having a discussion where the future of the world teeters on the knife-edge of nuclear destruction with a man who has your wife’s vagina emblazoned on his forehead. The notion that there is something wrong with the new ruler of the Evil Empire does not take very long to sink in.… Then this new man with the disturbing birthmark that was like a cloud, seeming to take on the shape of whatever might be on the viewer’s mind.
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