John Miller....

has a mostly laudatory article in the current National Review rediscovering the novel "Advise and Consent" by Allen Drury. I have to be one of the few bleedin' hearts out there who in fact read all six novels in the series, each more shrill and despairing than the last. Ah but poor Allen was a declinist at the end of the day, he really believed that the USSR which could not get a cosmonaut on the moon had a arsenal composed of weather control machines and deathrays. I've always had a perverse respect for Drury, like Gore Vidal (another shrill natterin' nabob of negativism) he Wrote Big Novels About Big Topics set in Washington DC, it must have killed him that despite a Pulitzer Prize he was slowly pushed off the shelves by the semi literate likes of Tom Clancy. Which is Miller's key point (lookit me! I'm actually agreeing with a National Review correspondent...), that most novels set in the DC Milieu are thrillers very disposable and rooted in the moment, journalistic in a word. Drury however wanted to wrestle with the big issues, even if he thought the Big Issues included Soviet Laser Cannons concealed on their allegedly innocent fishing trawlers. Otherwise I'd like to commend The National Review for it's sacerdotal silence on the subject of Drury's alleged homosexuality you could almost call it "respectful" if it wasn't 2015 after all.