Summer Writing
Working on a piece of sexed-up nonfiction. It centers on the murder of a curator at the Louvre leading to a trail of clues found in Hope, Ark., and the White House and the discovery of a centuries-old secret society. There's a subplot. In the house where the former President grew up, a woman finds a humorist's essays which will change her life forever and in which an Englishwoman expounds on the use and misuse of punctuation marks. Meantime, a Trenton street gang puts out a hit on the bounty hunter and professional wrestler known as Nature Boy. So Princeton students who are trying to unravel the mysteries of the text become ensnared in the murderous intrigue.
All the while a noted satirist and friend of the President recalls his decades-long friendship with an English Benedictine monk, recollecting the romance between the editor in chief of a New York fashion magazine and a conservative widower who, as the host of "Meet the Press," remembers his father and the other important teachers in his life. (His father is an old man who died while trying to rescue a little girl from danger and who discovers that all will be explained to him in the afterlife.) The conservative TV host is in fact a Harvard scholar writing a biography of the Treasury secretary as a "masque" in a vain attempt to save the Vatican from the machinations of another underground society. It's the sixth volume of "The Dark Tower," a series about time travel and a heroic quest, a behind-the-scenes account of the Bush administration's decision-making as it drew up plans to invade Iraq.
Then, a bicycle messenger becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a sleazy Los Angeles defense attorney, a former essayist and novelist, who took on the Bush administration in verse. The messenger is the target of an assassin who the C.I.A. believes is one of many rogue agents, theologians, and art historians related to "The Da Vinci Code." Two of these agents are also husband and wife, investigating the murders of a Supreme Court justice and two of his law clerks, Jack and Jackie, tracing them to Hillary Rodham Clinton's "path to power."
In the final chapters, in Montreal, a forensic anthropologist discovers the skeletons of three young women in the basement of a pizzeria operated by a left-wing film director, an upper-class Manhattan woman and her best friend hunting for "P.H.'s" (prospective husbands). The discovery of the skeltons highlights the Great Backlash, in which conservatives "won the heart of America," exemplified by an Italian-American woman in Pennsylvania, who is haunted by her first love, and who explores the lives of ostensibly straight black men who have sex with men, and the health consequences for a black community that's been preyed upon by "incredible political animals," from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.
