Secret Dead Blog Interview: Jamie Malanowski

Back in my college days at La Salle, I was a huge fan of SPY magazine, where Jamie Malanowski worked as an editor. I knew Jamie worked at SPY, because I knew the masthead of SPY like Beatlemaniacs knew the names John, Paul, George and Ringo. (Yes, I was a serious magazine nerd, even at that tender age.)

So imagine my surprise when a college professor told me, “Hey, you know Jamie Malanowski is a La Salle grad, don’t you?” This was askin to someone saying, “Hey, you knew George Harrison went here, right?”

I wrote to Jamie, and he was kind enough to invite me up to New York to have lunch and give me some much-needed early career advice. I can’t overestimate how big a deal this was. Jamie had a job at the best magazine on Earth. He’d just published his first novel, a political satire called Mr. Stupid Goes to Washington about a bumbling Indiana senator who somehow winds up Vice President of the United States. And most important of all: he’d kept his Polish surname.

So of course he was my hero.

Now Jamie’s back with his second novel political satire. And like its predecessor nailed Washington politics back in the early 1990s, The Coup nails D.C. today with another fictional Vice President who, as the book's tag line says, "wants to move up."

Jamie was kind enough to agree to sit down for a short Q&A, Pole to Pole.

Secret Dead Blog: You are the master of the vice-presidential political satire. How did you fall into this particular sub-genre? What about the No. 2 guy fascinates you?

Jamie Malanowski: Master of the Vice Presidential Political Satire? I like it! It is a small patch, but it is my own.

There are a couple of reasons why I gravitate towards these stories. One, the VP is an inherently absurd position. It is usual held by ambitious alpha males who have all the drive and ego of those who end up in the top slot, but who are then kind of neutered. (Cheney is a different breed of cat, of course; I'll have to dream up something just for him--the infallible power behind the throne who leads the president into disaster.)

The other reason that I'm attracted is that the rules of the line of succession make the dramatic stakes and the maneuvering very clear. When Tom DeLay and the Republicans impeached Clinton in 1998, a lot of people said they were attempting a coup, but what kind of coup would it have been if Al Gore succeeded Clinton? In my novel, when Godwin Pope launches his manueverings, he will be the beneficiary.

By the way, I do write other kinds of stories. Just not as well.

SDB: When you're not skewering politicians in The Coup, you're sticking it to journalists. How often do former colleagues email or call you and say, "Godamnit, Malanowski... am I Character X?"

JM: "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you,'' eh? Alas, no one has called. I don't know if that means I am being frozen out by angry former colleagues, or that my ex-colleagues have neglected to read the book. Probably the latter. But it is true, that like writers everywhere, I took bits of what I saw in people around me and fashioned these characters, although it's not accurate to say that any single character is based on any single person. With the exception of Maggie Newbold. And if you're sure that you're as sexy as Maggie Newbold, please drop me an email at jamie@jamiemalanowski.com. We'll discuss.

SDB: Someone told me that The Coup was originally a screeplay. (Okay, okay... you mentioned this at your reading here in Philly. But I like to sound "plugged-in.") What was the most surprising thing about turning it into a novel?

JM: I thought it would be a bit of a chore to convert it, but it was tremednous fun. Screenplays are exercises in throwing things out and making yourself more succinct. In the novel, I could explore and elaborate and imagine thoughts and back stories for the characters. Whole scenes had to be written--for example, Jack Mahone's routine at the Correspondent's Dinner for example, was newly imagined, and I'm very pleased with how that turned out. It helps make Jack a rounder person--we've seen him be a scheming second-rater who's in over his head, but here he's using his communications skills, and he's funny and self-deprecating and humbly grateful to be getting a new start. And Godwin has to confront his feelings about that, and has to consider abandoning his plan. I think that kind of scene makes it harder for the reader to easily choose sides between Godwin and Jack, and that confusion, more than anything, is what I want readers to take away from the book. I know readers are going to like Godwin, but I want them to feel a bit queasy about liking him too easily.

SDB: You're the managing editor of Playboy. What kind of articles are you most drawn to?

JM: After reading and writing thousands of magazine pieces, I'm a hard audience. Jaded, really. It's nearly impossible for me to read pieces without re-editing them as I go along. That said, I'm drawn to pieces that surprise me. That have more than one turn in the road. That educate me. I'm a big fan of Anthony Lane, John Lahr and Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times, David Ignatius in the Washington Post, Peter King on SI.com, Fred Kaplan in slate.com, Mark Halperin in Time, Jim Fallows and Sandra Tsing Loh in The Atlantic, and Kurt Andersen in New York. There's also a kid named Gore Vidal whose pieces I always read when they appear. (I'm sure I'll think of 35 other people the minute I hit the SEND button.) I edited two pieces in Playboy this year of which I am very proud: "Sex in Iran," by Pari Esfandiari and Richard Buskin in the May issue, which was a surprising and enlightening story about the complexity of Iranian life, and "The Passion of Paul Wolfowitz" by James Rosen in the November issue, which offered a surprising take and enlightening account of a story that seemed to have been wrung dry.

At this point, I read more books than magazines. Economics are draining a lot of the surprise and experimentation out of magazines; writers feel freer when they get to roam the wild open pages of their books.

The Coup (Doubleday $22.95) is available at fine bookstores everywhere.