A savagely funny and knowing political satire about a vice president with an irresistible itch to move up a notch.

Godwin Pope, the current vice president of the United States, is bored out of his skull. The one-time software billionaire and hyperconfident alpha male has been reduced to the most empty tasks while the administration of President Jack Mahone sinks lower and lower in the polls with every gaffe and self-generated fiasco. Into his orbit swings Maggie Newbold, the sexy fallen-star journalist with a bad habit of sleeping with her sources, who's on a rehabilitation tour with Newsbreak magazine. Pope sees in Maggie the instrument of his salvation, and he sets into motion a plot of incredible subtlety (and, he believes, untraceability) whereby the Mahone administration will be so tarred by scandal that even though the president didn't actually do anything, he'll have no choice but to resign. Leaving the chair in the Oval Office vacant for Pope's ascension, just as he deserves. Drawing on our current political climate (the incestuous relationship between the press and the politicians, government agendas driven by scandal and spin, raging ambition and toxic competition at the highest levels) while telling an unforgettable and ingeniously plotted story, The Coup is deliciously cynical, unsurpassingly witty—and dismayingly believable.

"'In this sly Washington satire, the second novel from Playboy managing editor Malanowski (Mr. Stupid Goes to Washington), a scheming U.S. vice president sets out to 'dethrone' the president. After four years in the Senate, Godwin Pope, a rich and handsome Princeton grad, decides to run for president against the incumbent, Jack Mahone, a slick, folksy former Louisiana governor who crushes him in a primary debate. In a surprise move, Jack asks Godwin to be his running mate and Godwin accepts. Soon after their victory, Godwin becomes bored and covets the top job for himself. Enter Irene Kim, a comely trade mission rep (spy?!) from China, who Godwin suspects could snare Jack in a sex scandal of impeachment proportions. The flirtatious fly in the ointment is Newsbreak journalist Maggie Newbold, a disgraced Pulitzer Prize winner struggling to expose — or embrace — Godwin, a brilliant manipulator who presents a delicious paradoxical choice to Maggie at novel's end. Malanowski's portrait of a master political double-dealer is as entertaining as it is scary. (July)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"'One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president,' said Dan Quayle. 'And that one word is ... "to be prepared."'

Well, no one has quite prepared Godwin Pope. He's a software tycoon, an Ivy League grad, a leading intellectual light and one of the world's most eligible bachelors. But against his better judgment, he's agreed to take a job that Harry Truman once compared... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) to 'a cow's fifth teat' and that John Adams said was 'the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.' As if that weren't bad enough, Pope is playing No. 2 to the promiscuous, diabolically slick Jack Mahone, 'a Louisiana man, Baton Rouge, fifty-nine years old, ex-governor, ex-senator, passably handsome, garrulous, louche, a man who possessed a common touch, a man of the people.'

That last quality explains why it's Mahone and not Pope hearing 'Hail to the Chief' everywhere he goes. 'They like me,' explains the president. 'That's the thing. They don't think I'm so brilliant and they're not sure if I'm all that trustworthy, but they like me. They may not always know it when they meet me, but sooner or later, they will like me.' Unfortunately, it's taken Mahone just 13 months to squander that goodwill, plunging to the lowest favorability ratings in history. And now his resentful and ignored veep has the opening he's been waiting for. By weaving together such disparate parties as a Chinese-American prostitute, a disgruntled White House speechwriter, an Indonesian banker and the president's own brother, Pope sets out to steal Mahone's job out from under him.

'This wasn't going to be easy,' Pope acknowledges. 'The whole fantastic idea was still a long shot. But if things worked out the way they could, Jack Mahone would soon be accused of treason against his own country, and despite having committed no treason, he would find himself confronted by a web of circumstantial evidence that would hang a saint.'

Is it just me, or does a book premised on evicting the president smack of wish fulfillment? At the very least, Jamie Malanowski's satirical novel will be required summer reading for C-SPAN watchers, who will happily sniff out the veiled allusions to, oh, Dennis Hastert, Sam Donaldson, Arlen Specter, Michael Beschloss, Peggy Noonan, Bill Gates, Arianna Huffington, Matt Drudge and on and on. (Surely, novels like these should start providing indexes.)

Fortunately, if the gawkers read a bit more closely, they will also find a knowing dissection of the media-politics nexus. Nobody, to my knowledge, has better nailed the fatuity of the White House Correspondents' Association dinner: 'The media spent 364 days a year actively gunning for Washington's officials, then on the 365th, everybody on each side put on tuxedos and party dresses and pretended to lavish respect on one another, which they did by pointedly mocking the foibles, errors, and gaffes of the other.'

I also enjoyed this weary protest from a Chinese spy: 'Every time somebody in Los Alamos leaves a memo on a copier, they start smelling chow mein.' And there's a Hecht-MacArthur tang to this smackdown of a senior official: 'It looks to me like the Titanic's in real danger of going down, and what's more, Leonardo DiCaprio ain't playing you in the movie.' That line comes courtesy of Maggie Newbold, a Newsbreak reporter seduced and exploited by Pope, and if her general babeliciousness doesn't tip you off, her habit of sleeping with sources to get all her stories should alert you that she is the creation of a male writer. As should the following sequence: '"Come on," she said, reaching for his crotch, "let's put some vice in this vice presidency."' This is followed by 'a volcanically shuddering nooner,' and it spoils nothing to say that the book's concluding act takes place atop the Oval Office desk (and is interspersed with plugs for African infant mortality relief).

So yes, at regular intervals, 'The Coup' threatens to slide into the vale of trash, but Malanowski, the managing editor of Playboy and a former Spy columnist, is too savvy an observer and too skillful a plotsmith to lose his grip entirely. All the same, there's a curiously ancien regime quality to this story, with its Clintonesque president and its notion that vice presidents need to seize the West Wing to take over the country. One need only examine the office's current occupant to see how quaint that idea really is. As the reporting of this newspaper has made clear, America's No. 2 guy has spent the past six years single-mindedly accumulating power — and leaving scarcely a ripple. In Dick Cheney we behold a warmaker who has never gone to war, believes 'torture' is one thing and 'cruelty' another, claims executive privilege and, in the same breath, denies he is part of the executive branch, and gives aid and comfort to both his lesbian daughter and the most fiercely homophobic administration in American history. Even so knowing a writer as Jamie Malanowski could never have invented such a contradictory and alarming character. Once again, politics has slipped out of fiction's reach.

" Reviewed by Reviewed By Brigitte Weeks, a former editor of The Washington Post Book WorldCarolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.comLouis Bayard, a novelist and reviewer critic in Washington, D.C., Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Advance Praise for The Coup

“Jamie Malanowski has written a biting and hilarious satire of the Journalistic-Political Scandal Complex. A hapless president and a hooker. An evil, conniving vice president, and a journalist horny for her next big scoop. They fall in and out of power while they fall in and out of bed. Where does Malanowski come up with this stuff?”

—Paul Begala, contributor to CNN’s The Situation Room and author of Is Our Children Learning?: The Case Against George W. Bush

JAMES MALANOWSKI is currently the managing editor of Playboy. He was on the founding staff of Spy and held senior editorial positions there as well as at Time and other magazines. He cowrote the HBO film Pentagon Wars, and is the author of the novel Mr. Stupid Goes to Washington and coauthor of the humor book Spy High.