Times Lets Scooter Off Easy
Rachel Donadio’s back-page piece on politicans moonlighting as novelists in yesterday’s NYTBR has a gaping hole at its center. With so much upfront attention to political B-listers like Barbara Boxer and Barbara Mikulski, Scooter Libby rates just two short paragraphs towards the end, of which I’ll quote the first:
“Libby, who of late has been in the cross-hairs of federal prosecutors in the C.I.A. leak case, is also the author of an accomplished first novel, The Apprentice (1996). Set in Japan in 1903, between the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, it unfolds at an inn in a remote village, where a group of travelers stranded during a snowstorm become increasingly suspicious of one another, and a youth referred to only as ‘the apprentice’ falls in love with an actress in a visiting troupe.”
The problem with the first sentence, of course, is that Libby’s actually been indicted by the federal prosecutors. OK, fine; that’s simply a matter of the story having been sent to the printers ages ago, as measured by the rapid pace of the news cycle. But the blandness of that second sentence…that’s a lot harder to justify, given the pornographic details supplied by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker last Monday, including incestual gang rape and a disturbing new take on bearbaiting. And it can’t be because the Review shies away from such sordidness, because the same issue devotes entire articles to contemplation of African-American men’s penises and an old man’s infatuation with a teenage prostitute.
Perhaps it’s because The Apprentice is out of print, and somebody had already checked out the New York Public Library’s copy? Wherever Donadio’s information about the novel came from, though, it probably wasn’t the book’s Amazon page, which clearly gives the name of “the apprentice” as Setsuo.
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