Blog Days
By Hilary Boller
Ana Marie Cox became noteworthy in Washington during the summer of 2004. Perhaps you know her better through her Internet pseudonym, Wonkette, Washington’s gossip blog that serves the greater D.C. community with “politics for dirty minds.” Cox entered the realm of semi-stardom when Wonkette linked readers to “The Washingtonienne,” a tawdry Internet diary detailing the wanton sexual exploits of then Hill staffer Jessica Cutler. From start to finish, the scandal amounted to three weeks of news: Cutler was quickly fired and hit the talk show circuit while Cox’s Wonkette received enough traffic to cement it as a feature of the Washington blogosphere. Now, after retiring from Wonkette, Cox has reemerged with her freshman offering to the fiction world, Dog Days (Riverhead).
Internet conspiracy theorists can feel vindicated: far-fetched speculation that Cox and Cutler cooked up the entire “Washingtonienne” scandal in order to score book deals may well have come to fruition. Future schemers take note, however: Cox should have hopped on the fiction bandwagon when Cutler herself did, almost a full year ago, when people still vaguely remembered her name and cared about the events of the failed Kerry-Edwards campaign from which the plots of both books are derived.
The main character of Dog Days is Melanie Thornton, a junior aide on the Presidential campaign of rising Democrat John Hillman. Whatever green-horned idealism Melanie arrived with has been jettisoned in favor of crafting expedient media spin for her candidate and engaging in a heated summer fling with a married member of the media elite. She faces a two-pronged threat when a Swift-Boat-esque fringe group accuses her candidate of being brainwashed on the same day that a well-known gossip columnist publicly speculates about Melanie and her media beau. Hoping a juicier scandal can overshadow these two damning blows, Melanie and her soullessly scheming gal-pal, Julie, concoct “The Capitolette,” a fictitious Hill staffer who chronicles her sexual exploits in a tawdry Internet diary. Further details feel unnecessary; we’ve all heard this before, haven’t we?
To call Dog Days a novel is a generous interpretation of the genre at best. In an interview last week with Alex Kingsbury, Cox laid out her recipe for success as an author: “Always borrow when you can. Original writing is a last resort.” While this system may work well in a gossip blog, it doesn’t translate well into long-form prose. Cox’s pseudo-fiction comes across as lazy and indifferent. Characters are painted with the broadest of brush strokes, with painful phrases that could only have come from one too many trips into the Shift-F7 thesaurus in Microsoft Word. At no point do we get the sense that there is even a tremor of doubt in how events will unfold. Melanie’s “Capitolette” plan works well enough, and although our heroine gets something of her just deserts by the book’s end, after slogging through the whole ordeal, it’s hard to care.
The chapters of Dog Days are littered with inane chattering in one electronic form or another, making it difficult to rank the severity of each mini-crisis and missive. This is the unfortunate side effect of allowing everything to be both immediate and crucial: suddenly nothing is, and both the plot and the reader suffer for it. The optimist in me thinks Cox is trying to make some point about D.C.’s slavish devotion to technology. The pessimist thinks she is clearly a victim herself of this devotion, and worse yet, an upbeat advocate for it. We are repeatedly clobbered over the head with references to blogs and bloggers, who constitute a fifth-column of power in Cox’s fantasyland. Perhaps Cox is merely showing us the whirring, fast-paced lifestyle of Washington’s khaki-wearing minions. Coming from the Wonkette, it reads like wanton self-promotion and shout-outs to friends in the business.
To her credit, Cox works in a few deliciously snippy comments about the life and times of D.C.’s bottom-rung assistants and staffers. She gets the martini-as-dinner concept, the toxic gossiping, and the endless carousing among staffers, assistants, and their superiors. She captures the inflated egos of every lowly pundit-in-training, and accurately pinpoints Washington’s silly social stratification when describing “the hidebound high-school social cliquery that govern[s] so much maneuvering in D.C.” Unfortunately, though, these gems are strewn far too carelessly about the pages, rendering whatever individual bite they have subdued.
At last count, Dog Days was selling only slightly better than Quantitative Chemical Analysis, Sixth Edition on Amazon.com. It is a pity, really. The concept driving Dog Days has such potential. New-fangled contraptions like Blackberrys and instant messenger have altered both the office and social life for young college graduates in lasting ways. There are those among us, of course, who believe that Washington is powered entirely by the energy squeezed from these ambitious twenty-somethings who swoop down into the capital for their requisite two years of glory and collating. Capturing the transient, heady days of this bottom-rung of the D.C. social strata would have done for Washington what Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep recently did for the life inside America’s elite boarding schools. Cox missed a golden opportunity here to shed real light on these strange animals in their natural habitat.
Political fodder for blogs has rarely been better than at present. With the swirling storm clouds of Abramoff and DeLay on the horizon, with Hillary Clinton calling Congress a plantation and Teddy Kennedy bellowing into the night, with Brownie doing a heckuva job, and the NSA listening in on our phone conversations, who among us has the time or energy to devote to an also-ran sex scandal from yesteryear, much less read a poorly fictionalized account thereof? Cox unwittingly sums it up best through the frank words of her leading lady: “This gossip was too old to hold her attention.” Don’t let the freshly minted hardcover fool you. Dog Days is stale news, and poorly articulated news at that.
Hilary Boller is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.
