A Sorry State of Affairs

In Sinclair Lewis’s classic cautionary tale, It Can’t Happen Here, Secretary of State Lee Sarason tries to increase his clout by offering golden opportunities and rosy futures. “His office door,” we are told, “became the door of ambition.” There are no such doors in A.G. Doran’s debut, Pale Dread. The State Department here is where ambition goes to die. “The Building” is variously described as an asylum and “a prison whose inmates voluntarily commuted to it each day.” One of those inmates is Doran’s protagonist, J. Leo “Fitz” Fitzpatrick. His struggles to stay afloat amid intrigue, incompetence, bureaucratic wrangling, and deep-state shenanigans make for a novel that manages to be both an uproarious romp and a scalpel-sharp satire.

For a while, Fitz was heading onward and upward in his career trajectory. After leaving law school, he spent time in the military, then served in the intelligence community before taking up a position with the National Security Council. But then he moved to the State Department, and from that point on he has been going nowhere fast. Undervalued and overlooked, he spends soul-crushing working days writing memoranda on grand strategy that are seldom read, let alone acted on, and dreaming of escape from the Building. When he writes a memo arguing that underweight women are a national security risk, he hopes it will lead to his dismissal. Instead, it makes its way up to the seventh floor where it arouses the interest of several movers and shakers of U.S. foreign policy.

Fitz is summoned to “the floor of the gods” and grilled by Breton Haken, director of the Secretary’s Policy Advisors Section and his deputy, Bill Cortes. He accepts a senior role with SPAS, seeing it as a passport to a more rewarding line of work made up of interesting challenges rather than bureaucratic drudgery. He quickly learns the hard way that he has simply swapped one corner of the asylum for a bigger one. In these corridors of misplaced power he is privy to squabbling and scheming, backstabbing and fault-finding, chaos and confusion, plus all manner of day-to-day “dipshittery” involving pitch meetings, dissent cables, and “clearing paper.”

Mercifully, Fitz finds an ally in Piers Gaveston Buckburn—”Buck to friends.” This colorful Foreign Service officer tells Fitz he had to “rotate back early” to D.C. after suffering his unfair share of “misfortunes” during postings overseas, many as a result of illicit encounters with young men. Buck takes Fitz under his wing and helps keep him safe and sane while in the Building and in his favorite watering hole, the Red Hatter. Fitz also meets a captivating woman in Public Affairs. His “dark lady” remains an unknown entity and a beguiling mystery, one who dominates his thoughts and fills his dreams. When he speaks to her, he gets tongue-tied. And when he gets his desire under control and learns her name is Naomi, she joins Buck in looking out for him.

It turns out Fitz needs all the help he can get. Unbeknownst to him, his therapist’s office is bugged, and certain compromising confessions are reaching the ears of hostile parties. His wife, a short-tempered, foul-mouthed, two-timing FBI agent, despises him and is dead-set on tarnishing his reputation. His new boss, the redoubtable and maniacal Lamia, a professor from Evrie University, California, arrives to shake up and smooth down the State Department. Attended by her faithful personal deputy, referred to by staff as “the henchmaiden,” Lamia enforces tough crackdowns and instills an atmosphere of fear. When she discovers that Fitz has been contributing to memos on nuclear disarmament, she becomes hell-bent on stamping out the threat posed by him—which may well entail stamping him out.

Pale Dread is a supremely accomplished first novel. Doran, who in a past life worked in the State Department, gives the reader both an insider’s view and, we can only hope, a warped perspective of the inner workings of the Building. The book’s subtitle informs us this is “a novel about affairs of state,” but in places it is also about the state of affairs in Washington. The country’s new president, “a Jacksonian populist,” ruffles feathers. The secretary of state is fired “by means of novel ceremony: social media.” Every morning life goes on, the city’s streets filling with a steady stream of “managerial serfs and sociopaths: smartly attired, carelessly overmedicated, animated by their legion anxieties.” “Such were the times,” runs a recurring phrase.

When the focus is on the Building and its occupants, Doran serves up riotous episodes. Fitz encounters stupidity in a discussion about antisemitism with an ignorant minion. He grapples with absurdity when he is both questioned by Lamia and screened by the White House Liaison office (“So you support America’s president?” asks his interviewer. “Of course,” Fitz answers. “Whose president would I support?”). There is more drollery every time Fitz’s supervisor, Albus Palaver Proctor IV, pops up and riles his underling with his banal stock phrases (“Good diplomacy begins in this building”), misguided advocacy for conflict (“War is good for social cohesion and community and identity and purpose”), and smug boasting about recent successes. “It was a WASP habit to share good news with those whom they disliked,” Doran writes.

The humor keeps coming, often in the form of comparisons. Some are exaggerated: “Papists, like gout, were an ailment to be managed, not cured.” Others are audacious, such as Buck’s claim that Darcy in Pride and Prejudice “comes off like the Ted Bundy of Regency England.” Doran is also fond of this kind of witty pile-up: At one point, Fitz’s facial expression resembles that of “a boy who just learned about Hiroshima, sex, and the death of Santa Claus at a playground briefing”; elsewhere, Fitz won’t rule out God’s existence, “even when confronted with some serious argument for atheism—Boston City Hall, the art of Jackson Pollock, or the incessant cacophony of mechanistic noise.”

Doran also devotes a whole chapter to a comic set piece on an event called the Ministerial, attended by dignitaries from all over the world. Suffice to say, anything that could go wrong does go wrong. After farcical mishaps, misunderstandings, and miscommunications, Fitz and Buck resort to their routine of decompressing with drinks to blot out the madness that engulfs them.

The fun, mayhem, and acute observations work wonders, but only because Doran’s characterization is so strong. Buck is a compelling creation, a larger-than-life eccentric who, despite the odd overly florid utterance, entertains with anecdotes about his wild misadventures on the diplomatic circuit and his boozy exchanges with Fitz on life, love, literature, and the state of civilization. Man-hating Lamia steals scenes as an unhinged villainess who ruthlessly pursues an agenda of removing obelisks and all other “phallo-patriarchal symbols from Department of State facilities,” and who maintains that “There are two kinds of eunuchs: the kind nature makes and the kind that I make.” Best of all is hapless idealist Fitz, who rises above the ineptitude around him yet is too naïve to differentiate between casual threats and impending danger.

“Are we doomed?” he asks at one juncture. “Afraid so,” replies Buck. “This is the most duplicitous and dickless agency on the face of the earth. But do try to enjoy it.” Doran provides little enjoyment for his hero, but a huge amount for his reader.

Pale Dread: A Novel About Affairs of State
by A.G. Doran
Deoraí Publishing, 374 pp., $17.99

Malcolm Forbes is a writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and other publications.