Toward the end of Thomas Mallon’s Finale, Nancy Reagan, standing alone beneath a star-filled sky in the California desert, muses that "she didn’t know who [Ronald Reagan] was, and she never had." The real-life Nancy once wrote something similar: "Although he loves people, [Ronald] often seems remote, and he doesn’t let anybody get too close. There’s a wall around him. He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier."
The former first lady wasn’t alone in this observation. It has become so commonplace in accounts of the man’s life that it now threatens to detract from a clear understanding of Reagan’s achievement. Now, if journalists and historians can’t successfully reveal the inner Reagan, what better tool than the historical novel? The character Ronald Reagan can be made to reveal his thoughts in a way that the real-life Ronald Reagan chose not to. And if the writer is sensitive, his imagined version of events might offer insights that the historian, constrained by reality, could never give.
Enter Thomas Mallon. An excellent writer with a conservative pedigree (he has contributed to National Review), Mallon has written a number of very good political novels, most recently Watergate, which examined Nixon’s tumultuous second term. In Finale, Mallon turns his attention to the Reagan years, chronicling the last months of 1986, when Reagan negotiated with Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit and the Democrats took control of the Senate.
Despite its focus on a limited time span, Finale includes all sorts of people—Margaret Thatcher, Eva Gabor, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. show up, and both Nancy Reagan and Christopher Hitchens tell much of the story from their point of view. Mallon also makes up two central characters: Anders Little, a sexually confused NSC analyst, and Anne Macmurray, a disaffected moderate Republican (and protagonist of an earlier Mallon work, Dewey Defeats Truman).
Mallon’s ambition in writing a sweeping, zeitgeisty book is commendable. Modern fiction, so often lost in turgid personal dramas, needs more epic. But Finale ends up being a disappointing feint in the right direction instead of the real deal.
Its flaws are threefold. Mallon doesn’t use his main characters very well. Christopher Hitchens’ presence and manner, as imagined by Mallon are annoying. The fictional characters, though sympathetic, are missed opportunities. Little is a former Democrat who veered right because of the party’s ineffectual foreign policy, but Mallon abandons exploring this interesting theme early in the book. In a similar vein, he fails to use Macmurray to explore the situation of the Rockefeller Republicans, who began their long decline with Reagan’s victory in 1980.
In addition to these missteps, Mallon doesn’t use his fictional license to have his characters say anything new. Mallon’s Nancy Reagan, when she worries for her husband’s safety and frets over her astrologer’s predictions, is merely stating what the real Nancy Reagan said in her autobiography My Turn. The same is true when almost every person in Finale voices concerns about Reagan’s "remoteness"—we get it. Unfortunately, Mallon makes this observation the central feature of his work, despite the novelist’s liberty to guess what was going on behind the president’s reserve.
All this isn’t to say that Finale is a bad book. As a stylist, Mallon is at the top of his game, and writes a keeper on almost every page—Maureen Reagan can "hear the overheartiness in her voice, a mark of a failed politician, trying to win someone over by dialing things up a notch too high"; an imprisoned Soviet dissident remembers "news of [Reagan’s ‘evil empire’] speech had spread joyously through the camps, faster than the usual flu." He effectively conveys the horror of the AIDS epidemic, and the cruelty with which some people acted toward victims of that disease. Equally compelling is his version of the Reykjavik summit, which illustrates Reagan’s use of humor to disarm and confound both Gorbachev and American critics.
But these virtues don’t make up for Finale’s real failing, which is its lack of chapters from Reagan’s point of view. Mallon makes a lame attempt at this in the book’s final pages, which take place in 1996. By then, Reagan, suffering from Alzheimer’s, has lost his memory—remote now, even from himself. This is a gimmick that ends the book on a decidedly sour note.
Why couldn’t Mallon have used a lucid Reagan to explore what is obvious from his life: his great ambition and certainty in the power of American ideals? Reagan had extraordinary faith both in his own abilities and in the American people, whom he saw weather depression and war in the 1930s and 40s. Three decades later, when many politicians believed the United States to be finished as a superpower, Reagan was a lonely voice in opposition. Poor leadership and bad policy, he said, had brought America low. With change, the nation could recover its strength, and defeat—not accommodate—the Soviet Union.
These were not popular positions among elites in either party, yet Reagan held to them. Like his hero Franklin Roosevelt, all of Reagan’s triumphs flowed from a single act of defiance—a refusal to believe the American system could not be restored to its former greatness.
Finale ought to have explored this Reagan with the full arsenal available to fiction. Instead, readers will end the book like Mallon’s characters—aware that they have been in the presence of a great man, but unable to explain why.