Politics By Allegory

IT IS hardly surprising that the first novel to come from the typewriter of the 1971 President of The Crimson is about the harsh lessons of contemporary politics viewed from the activist perspective of a onetime building-occupier. After all, author Garrett Epps '72 entered college in the era of LBJ, the draft and Vietnam, and marched out at the time of Nixon, Cambodia, and Gulf in Angola, with the April 1969 bust and Kent State in between. What comes as a surprise is that the novel, The Shad Treatment, is about the mud and blood of a Virginia governor's race in the classic populist-versus-conservative mold, and that it's good.

Nearly everyone who works in a political campaign, especially one seen as a clear case of the good guys against the bad, will tell you that although the experience is physically exhausting and emotionally draining, it is also probably the most exciting couple of months they've ever experienced. People who find themselves at the end of the trail--both politicians and reporters--often feel the urge to write about it; hence the overflowing cornucopia of political novels good and bad, and the more recent explosion of campaign books that claim to be nonfiction. Rarely, however, does a good political novel so closely tread the path of reality that it becomes a roman a clef which by its publication may influence the outcome of an upcoming election. The bleeding of real campaigns and easily identifiable political figures, composing a gripping tale and simultaneously making an explicit political statement, are what set The Shad Treatment apart from most political novels and make it worth reading.

The novel revolves around two ill-concealed politicians closely drawn from a recent Virginia campaign: MacIlwain Evans, a 26-year-old political operative whose family is deeply entrenched in the Virginia aristocracy, and his chosen boss and candidate, Thomas Jefferson Shadwell. Shadwell is a fiery populist state senator from the Virginia backwoods who first fought the conservative regular Democrats and is now waging his campaign for governor with a rhetoric that rings just short of a call to revolution.

Evans seems to be drawn from Epps himself; Shadwell corresponds in word and deed to Henry Howells, a state senator who ran for governor in 1973 and is running again this year. His previous losing campaign clearly is the basis for this novel. And Epps's sympathetic portrayal of Shadwell--and therefore Howells--may well influence the voting in Virginia this fall.

Depending on which of these two powerful characters the reader chooses to focus upon or identify with, The Shad Treatment can assume rather different kinds of significance. Evans's personal story is one with which many students--and even more of the recent alumni--can easily identify. Mac Evans, the narrator of the novel, describes in detail his disaffection with Harvard, its students, and especially its administration; he tells of being slowly but surely drawn first into sympathy with, and then active involvement in radical politics during the late '60s. He describes a famous scene outside Quincy House, when former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was surrounded by angry students and forced to speak briefly from the hood of a car before being led to safety by police. Although merely an interested spectator at that incident, Evans was a participant in the April 1969 occupation of University Hall, one of the last to enter the building, which he did at the urging of a friend. The experience he relates was clearly jarring: he found his file in an office and read his freshman proctor's slight unfavorable and unsympathetic report on him; on the stairs, he ran into the first woman he had slept with, and they stole upstairs, but the shallowness of the chance meeting stopped them from making love; finally, Evans was teargassed, beaten over the head with a policeman's club and arrested.

The immediate consequence of his arrest was a phone call from his older brother, then a rising young politician headed eventually for the governor's mansion. The Richmond papers had picked the Evans name out of the wire story on the Harvard violence, and his brother wanted to know why Mac was involved. The arrest of his brother didn't hurt Lester Evans politically; he became lieutenant governor and would certainly have made it at least to the governor's chair. But he developed a brain tumor that killed him in office. His brother's experience, as well as his father's career in politics and the foreign service that ended in self-imposed exile in South America because of charges that he had collaborated with communists, led Mac to suspect that politics eats good men alive. By the end of the novel he seems convinced of it.

Large sections of The Shad Treatment describe Evans's family, beginning with the arrival of an ancestor in 1619. Most of the narrative centers on Stephan Evans, Mac's great-great-grandfather, who built the family fortune through an early ironworks and cannon manufactury for the Civil War. The sections on Stephan Evans, his father, his brother, and his own life before the campaign are mostly good, interesting stories, filled with evocative description; when taken together they help explain Mac and his attachment to Thomas Jefferson Shadwell.

Mac Evans came to Shadwell's campaign after a year and a half at the University of Virginia Law School and about a year spent working on George McGovern's campaign. Tom Jeff is portrayed as a politician who is honest to a fault, and as sincere and concerned about the plight of "his people" as Jesus himself. Epps describes the campaign stop that Shadwell makes at a small-town general store:

And there, scrambling out of the Winnebago and hitting the ground in full gallop, is the candidate himself. So fast does he move that he is inside the store before the storekeeper can stir, blinking in the dimness and striding toward the storekeeper with his hand out, and the storekeeper is shaking his hand as he thinks yes, he is like his pictures, a squat, fat, funny owl of a man, straight black hair combed back from a ruler-edge part, Coke-bottle glasses betting the tiny eyes, the wide, grinning mouth jutting teeth above the weak chin.

Mac Evans nearly drives himself into the ground working for this man. During the campaign, Evans's father returns home, escaping from the explosion of a military coup in Latin America, and dies shortly thereafter. That, and the worsening election day prospects, take their toll on Evans. His enthusiasm flags, Shadwell's standing in the polls drops as his opponent launches a vicious attack based mainly on an antibusing theme, and not even a desperate series of rallies in the last week can save Tom Jeff.

Evans tries to tie his life back together, but without much success. His girlfriend during the campaign, the first woman he had been close to since college, decides to marry her old boyfriend. He feels alienated from his contemporaries in Richmond, and so leaves. As the novel ends, he finally falls asleep on a northbound train.

Although very well and smoothly written, The Shad Treatment does have its flaws. The long passages of description tend to become dull, as does a long excerpt from Mac's father's testimony before a Congressional committee. But it reads quickly, and to some, may make a powerful argument for staying out of politics. It does, however, make a strong case for electing Shadwell governor this year, and the publicity the novel is receiving in the Washington and Richmond press may make that possible. The real question now is whether Epps will follow The Shad Treatment with another novel. His first is filled with as much promise as the candidate he describes.