Do poetry and politics have anything to do with one another? Political oratory occasionally ascends to rarefied heights—Lincoln's "better angels of our nature," Churchill's "broad, sunlit uplands," Nehru's "tryst with destiny." But rhetoric aside, is there any meaningful way in which poetry influences politics or vice versa? Or are these human endeavors mutually incomprehensible, and insulated from each other by their incomprehension?
These are the issues broached by Calista in her latest effort, The Phantom Laundry. The book opens with a typical scene from modern American politics: a young conservative governor from the Midwest, who has just launched his campaign for the presidency, appears on a Fox News morning show. Smooth and winning, white, religious, and very conservative, Governor Wilkerson seems to have everything it takes to make it in the modern Republican Party. The cheerful, puppyish interviewers lob a few softball policy questions and then start chatting about his favorite movies, his favorite music, and so on. When they ask about his favorite book, Wilkerson says that apart from the Bible, his favorite book is The Bell Jar. "I think voters might have chosen very differently in 2008 and 2012 if they had heeded its message," Wilkerson says, shooting a knowing look at the camera.
The interviewers move on, but something is pulling at the corner of Wilkerson's mind. Only as he walks off the set does he realize his mistake: he meant to say The Bell Curve, not The Bell Jar. It was an inexplicable slip-up, since he has never read The Bell Jar. But his campaign is just making its first impression on the voters, and now is not the time to admit that he bungled a simple question on national television. He has no choice but to stick to his answer.
Wilkerson hastily reads the book, comes up with a few trite things to say if anyone asks about it, and then focuses on his tour through Iowa. But almost in spite of himself, he finds his thoughts returning to the novel and its harrowing story of youth, ambition, and mental illness. In minutes stolen between campaign appearances, he looks up Sylvia Plath poems on the internet, compulsively clicking from one to the next. His aides find it harder and harder to draw him away from his smartphone to go on stage or to work a line of voters.
Meanwhile, the Republican primary devolves into a clown show, with each candidate vying to be more outlandish and obnoxious than the last, like a political version of the penis game. Here Calista is at her sardonic best, punctuating long chapters of prose with punchy interstitial material consisting of candidates' Twitter feeds. The madness of the race is palpable.
As the novel builds toward its climax, Wilkerson finds himself on the ropes, unable to compete with the lunatics who have come to dominate the race. Where Wilkerson tends to use dog whistles to attract bigoted voters, his competitors freely express their bigoted thoughts, almost as asides, easily drawing in the voters who previously would have gone to Wilkerson. His campaign is capsizing, but he can salvage it with a strong performance in New Hampshire, and so he spends more and more time in the state, practicing the retail politics that launched his career in the first place.
It is here, in front of a gaggle of cameras and microphones, that he gets a troubling question from a distraught young woman. She describes her struggles with addiction and mental illness and holds up a tattered copy of The Bell Jar. Laboring to enunciate her words through her tears, she says that she knows Wilkerson must be able to empathize with people like her, since he found Plath's book so touching. But if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, then treatment will be beyond her reach. What will Wilkerson do for people like her if he is elected?
We don't see his answer. Instead, the book closes with a long car ride home from New Hampshire, the defeated candidate tired and pensive, surrounded by his dejected but loving family. Did he do the right thing? Calista doesn't answer, at least directly, and a lively debate has flared up, with many commenters insisting that no race-baiting Republican could possibly be redeemed by reading Sylvia Plath poetry, of all things. But if you believe that poetry can mean something even to a politician, that once it takes hold in someone's heart it never stops exerting its tidal pull, then maybe you have found a different answer somewhere in the pages of this beguiling novel.
