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You may not know Ana Marie Cox. However, if you are one of the millions who take their information nourishment from Internet blogs, odds are you know Wonkette, her electronic nom de plume.
Cox's Wonkette is to snarky inside-politics blogs what Jon Stewart's The Daily Show is to snarky dead-on (OK, they call it comedy) analysis of what's really happening in the nation's capital. They both shine a spotlight on the bottom-feeder qualities of politicians, always eager to point out their hypocrisies and double talk.
Wonkette.com apparently is not enough of a platform for Cox's diatribes, and she has now written a novel that trades on her insider knowledge of the Washington political machine.
One can't help but compare it to The Washingtonienne, the debut novel released last summer by Jessica Cutler, the bed-hopping blogger who used washingtonienne.com to detail her raunchy romps with senators and other Capitol Hill types. (Her current blog is jessicacutleronline.com.)
Wonkette not only wrote about washingtonienne.com but became part of the story when she published Cutler's identity, adding more fuel to a mini-firestorm of political scandal.
The jackets of the two novels tell volumes about what's between the covers -- literally and figuratively.
The cover of The Washingtonienne has cleavage ensconced in a lacy pink bra. The book is basically a sex romp.
The cover of Dog Days is red, white and blue with silhouettes of a donkey and an elephant. Though neither book is complimentary to Washington politics, Cox's book is less risque and more a behind-the-scenes look at the seamy -- not the steamy -- side of politics. It has its share of sex, but it also has something else: a protagonist who comes of age the good-old-fashioned way.
Melanie Thorton, a campaign aide for presidential candidate John Hillman, who might as well be named John Kerry, decides to direct attention away from her affair with a married journalist and a Swift Boat veterans-like scandal by creating an imaginary sex scandal through a blog called Capitolette. Sound familiar?
The novel has a stripped-down story line and limited character development. The plot is predictable and matter-of-fact. But it does have a blunt, albeit tawdry, honesty.
She shoves in our face the ugly realities easy to find in Washington: cronyism, partisanship, power trips, sex, drugs, alcohol and self-absorption.
Is there more of this going on in Washington, D.C., than, say, in Des Moines or Minneapolis or even Los Angeles or New York?
Maybe so. Maybe not.
Whether readers outside the world of politics or the geographic limitations of the nation's capital will want to read Dog Days is an open question.
But one thing's for sure: Readers already disillusioned by politics will see Cox's book as affirmation of what they've suspected all along.
Dog Days
By Ana Marie Cox
Riverhead, 274 pp., $23.95
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