The Awl

Now that Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue' is beginning to leak out onto the Internet in advance of next week's publication date, we are wrapping up our series analyzing the canon of vice presidential literature!

If you ever buy Spiro Agnew's novel The Canfield Decision, buy the mass-market paperback edition released by Berkley Medallion Books in March of 1977. For one thing, Berkley Medallion is the kind of publisher that inserts full-color cigarette advertisements between leaves of their books. For another thing, Berkley Medallion is the kind of publisher whose copyright pages include disclaimers such as: "Published by arrangement with Playboy Press." In other words, Berkley Medallion fiction is adult fiction. Accordingly, gentle readers, it is my duty—my gentle duty—to inform you that the following review of The Canfield Decision is Not Safe For Work.

In his memoir, published in 1980, Spiro Agnew describes how his novel, published in 1976, was received by reviewers:

My enemies attacked the book in two inconsistent ways. Some said it was the worst example of prose ever seen. Others said it was too well written for me to have authored it.

I am not Spiro Agnew's enemy, but it is true: One reason I believe that Agnew did write The Canfield Decision is that no one would pay a ghost writer to write such a mediocrity. Permit me to spoil the plot:

Vice President Porter Newton Canfield is wealthy, handsome and liberal. (He is also stupefyingly boring, but that is unintentional.) When the novel opens, Vice President Canfield has just declared that the United States should provide Israel with nuclear arms. Et cetera, et cetera. By the final chapter, the Soviet Union is threatening to intercept an American ship bound for Israel with missile-silo components, the world is closer to nuclear holocaust that at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis—and Vice President Canfield, high atop a wave of populist Zionism, is on the brink of forcing the President to resign. To achieve his coup, Canfield has gotten involved with a murderous network of Muslim spies and Jewish double-agents, and the tedious question on which Agnew hangs his plot is whether the Vice President's crimes will become public before he can seize the presidency.

All of this is set in the imaginary year 1983. In 1983, Agnew imagines, America has become a Democratic dystopia. For example, there is universal healthcare. For example, defense spending has declined. (To make sure that his readers get how dangerous liberals are, Agnew lards the book with political lectures about decadence; there is even a scene where hippies make love on the Vice President's lawn.) Sometimes it is hard to tell when Agnew is sermonizing, and when he is just being sloppy. In 1983, the City of Las Vegas is apparently located in the State of Arizona, observant Jews celebrate the Sabbath on Sundays, observant Muslims enjoy drinking beer, and straight women in America read Playgirl magazine. Are these meant to be jokes? Mostly it doesn't matter, mostly it is all atmospheric.

But there is one dystopian element of The Canfield Decision that the reader must accept in complete earnest if the plot is to make any sense:

In 1983, the American press is controlled and manipulated by a clandestine cadre of Zionists. Some of these Zionists are outright Jews, some of them are merely lesbians. Reading The Canfield Decision, I came to feel it would only be possible to enjoy Spiro Agnew's artistic if I were willing to be complicit in some soft anti-Semitism, some soft homophobia. And some soft racism. In one scene involving the Zionist conspirators, a character who has no part in the conspiracy remarks, "I just have a terrible fear of being raped by a black man"—and to my horror I realized that Agnew expected me to like that character for saying so.

But one doesn't read Berkley Medallion Books for human tolerance and human empathy. One reads Berkley Medallion Books for penis and vagina. On page 2 of The Canfield Decision, we meet the lead agent in the Vice President's Secret Service detail, Steve Galdari.

He shifted his 205 pounds to a more comfortable position. He wasn't quite in the shape he used to maintain during his basketball days at Columbia, but the muscle tone was a lot better than that of most forty-two-year-olds.

The reader immediately wonders on whom will Galdari get to draw his well-toned penis. On page 11, the reader finds out.

The plane was leaning over into its final approach course when Kathy Dryden, Canfield's personal secretary, entered the cabin, shorthand pad ready. How cool and fresh she looks, thought Galdari. Sexy, but more heavenly sexy than earthy sexy…. She was, he said to himself, a very sensitive lady.

Another character with a sexual destiny is the Vice President's chief political strategist, Zach Miller. We meet him on page 9:

All-star halfback, captain of the tennis team, president of his class, graduated from Princeton magna cum laude, Ph.D. from New York University in only two years, associate professor there in six years. It was an enviable record to combine with a strong, yet sensitively handsome face and a powerful, graceful body. Miller's large, dark, magnetic eyes were capable of cruelty or tenderness ….

Where will the reader find a woman worthy of such a magnificent prick? On page 57. There we meet Sirana Amiri, an Iranian spy, who is "strikingly beautiful by any standards." Because she is not American, Sirana does not read Playgirl; instead, she reads Vogue:

The long pageboy of the night before she had pinned into a white-ribboned upsweep, thus accenting the clean, flawless line of her jaw and making her look younger than twenty-six. The slight tough of lip and eye makeup was just enough to bring out the natural beauty of her features.

Small earrings of gold filigree complemented a narrow gold-chain necklace. She wore white calf medium-heel pumps, and her sleeveless dress, just barely above knee length, was of clinging white silk jersey with a green, blue and white belt of the same material.

If Agnew has to cut and paste from womens' magazines to describe his characters, how will he describe his characters' couplings? By cutting and pasting from mens' magazines. Here is Vice President Canfield, reminiscing about his first love, Wanda:

Golden hair and skin; slim body, incongruously voluptuous; violet eyes that made any encounter with a male dramatically personal; and a feline way of moving—that was Wanda. Unhurriedly, step by step, she brought him through the familiar kissing and touching rituals to that unforgettable night on Wyndham Hill. He could still remember the night noises and the smell of honeysuckle, and the indelible sight of a very eager Wanda, skirt rucked high on tan thighs and breasts brushing his face as she moved into the automobile position.

His inexperienced, blundering early crescendo mortified him and might have left him with much to overcome in the future, but her matter-of-fact patience and experience reerected the fallen structure. In time, he drove her home proudly, colors flying. Whatever had happened to Wanda? Somehow, after his freshman year at Princeton, he lost track of her.

(Am I the only American who does not know "the automobile position"? Would someone please enlighten me in the comments?)

This particular sex scene occurs on page 192. Will Agnew's inexperienced, blundering sexual metaphors leave him with much to overcome in the future? Or will he be able to drive the reader home proudly, colors flying? Here is Agnew on page 356, describing how Vice President Canfield puts his move on a member of the President's Cabinet:

As he reentered the living room, Meredith was standing with her back to him looking intently at a nude female figure—a Malaysian wood carving he had brought back from his trip. He came up behind her and put his hands on her warm shoulders.

"It's beautiful, Newt," she said, running her fingers over the polished wood.

"Not nearly as beautiful as you." As she turned, he took her in his arms and kissed her. There was no awkwardness, no uncertainty. Passion, released instantly, coursed down the familiar path, but after a minute Meredith said, "Newt, we can't. Not here. It's too dangerous."


He kissed her again, and she pressed against him feverishly, then pulled away. "Don't," she said with a nervous laugh. "You're making me all wet down there."

(Well? Commentators? Feeling "all wet down there"?)

For Agnew, passion always courses down "familiar" paths, kissing and touching are always "familiar" rituals—because, in The Canfield Decision, everything is familiar. Agnew wants to imagine original sex, he wants to conjure original spells—but his imagination and his language has been pickled by a lifetime in the vinegar of convention.

So, when the head of the Vice President's Secret Service detail finally kisses the Vice President's personal secretary, it is gentle, it is tender, "lips parted, tongues entered the play," and then "his hand cupped her breast." When the Vice President's chief political strategist finally beds the Iranian spy, it is "the most exciting, sexually satisfying two hours of her life," but what gave her the ultimate "delicious feeling of belonging," is when, "with a cross between a snort and a grunt," he "cupped her breast." At one point Agnew dares to let two breasts get "explored," at another point he permits one breast get "teased," and a third point he hints that a breast has been "squeezed"—but clearly it all makes him uncomfortable—because, in American soft porn, "cup" is the default verb to accompany the noun "breast," and Agnew is anxious about straying from the defaults. One of the sexiest and most original scenes in The Canfield Decision is the scene captured in the advertisement for Newport Menthol Kings that Berkley Medallion has inserted between pages 186 and 187. Here, a breast is strung onto a bow and fired like an arrow.

In general, of all the sex in The Canfield Decision, the only sex that rings true is the sexual harassment. The women in Agnew's novel are all secretaries, sex objects, or both. They are constantly being ogled, groped, grabbed. This did not increase my respect for Spiro Agnew; I did not feel that Spiro Agnew, Dystopian Novelist, was bravely revealing the misogyny witnessed by Spiro Agnew, Disgraced Politician; rather, I felt that Spiro Agnew was merely (and inadvertently) telling the truth about how deplorably men behaved in Washington in the 1970s. In other words, the vice presidential persona whose bravery the reader most admires, after reading The Canfield Decision, is Geraldine Ferraro.

It is common to observe that male novelists have trouble writing believable female characters. It is less common to observe that male novelists also have trouble writing believable male characters. The point is not that it is hard to write good fiction about the other gender; the point is that it is hard to write good fiction.

And, over the long course of The Canfield Decision, Spiro Agnew tries to learn. He learns, while writing Chapter 3, that chapters should not be fifty pages long. He learns, while writing Chapter 12, that dialogue may be used to develop a character. He learns, somewhere between Chapter 3 and Chapter 17, that it is better to leave words like "cumulonimbus" out of the description of a thunderstorm. Those are all fine lessons—they are lessons that helped Agnew what he really wanted to write, his memoir—but it is outrageous to expect a reader to sit through them.

Of course a reader need not sit through them; a reader can toss Agnew's mediocre novel aside unfinished. What cannot be tossed aside so easily are mediocre presidential administrations. And so Spiro Agnew, Aspiring Novelist, has a lesson for America about Sarah Palin, Aspiring President. Writers and politicians are at their most dangerous when they learn on the job.

Previously: Richard Nixon's 'Six Crises'

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.