cover image Spin

Spin

Tom Lowe. Atria Books, $23 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-671-01923-5

Literature, it's not. Deep, it's not. Primary Colors, it's not. But Lowe's debut is funny, anyway, a satire for mouth-breathers, full of scandalous sex, power politics and big money in the California state assembly. Narrator Jim Asher, a young Gulf War vet and sometime writer for TV pundits, begins as a campaign volunteer; in two short years, he is director of public affairs for the assembly's Republican speaker. Since these are actual resume items for first-time novelist Lowe, and since several of the events described did actually occur,the main appeal of this novel is the fan dance of facts and fabulation. The story is predictable, a morality tale grafted onto a political memoir. Jim makes piles of money, beds media queens, plays alpha male (a pet theory), double-deals and then winds up discovering himself in jail, with help from his cardboard mom, dad and lawyer grandpa--plus a war vet mentor straight out of central casting. The problem with this arrangement is that Lowe never reveals the story's mini-Machiavellis through the eyes of a straight (or even smart) character. Between swimming-pool orgies and media leaks, Jim has an irritating habit of indulging (with Lowe's approval, it would seem) in frat-house ""philosophical"" monologues, on Darwin, Nietzsche, etc., but when Jim is finally forced to make a moral choice, Lowe lets him strategize his way out of trouble. His yearlong travails in prison--a one-page coda in which he teaches his cell mate to read, using of all things, a copy of The Stranger (""Motherfucker talkin' 'bout the same shit I be goin' through"")--end more plausibly, with Jim reflecting at the beach house of a rich politico: ""Some say I got off easy. I say it's all about learning, and I've done a world of that."" He hasn't. Beneath the moralizing, this is a trickster's tale that seems to have tricked itself. (Aug.) FYI: Lowe was an aide in Michael Huffington's 1994 campaign for senator and is billed as the ""youngest person ever"" to serve as director for public affairs for the speaker of the California Assembly.