On the eve of the 2000 election, the charmed life of Washington hostess
Trudy Hopedale is quietly falling apart. Her daytime talk show is about
to be hijacked by a younger, prettier assistant, and then there is the
horrifying novel that her husband has written in secret, which contains
some rather troubling implications for a former Foreign Service
colleague. And what is her mother-in-law telling everyone?
Trudy's dear friend Donald Frizzé has benefited greatly from their
friendship. A widely recognized expert on the U.S. vice presidency and a
frequent guest on Trudy's program, Donald's latest scholarly pursuit is
a highly anticipated biography of Garrett Augustus Hobart, McKinley's
VP. Exactly who anticipates this book is hard to say, and soon Donald
finds himself dodging the awkward questions of plagiarism and his
sexuality, frequently during the same conversation.
Amid tides of intrigue and shifting allegiances, this little town's
extraordinary inhabitants swim helplessly, and alarmingly, toward their
remarkable fates. With a bewitching sense of nostalgia, Jeffrey Frank
has written an exquisitely funny, tender, and deeply perceptive novel
that vividly invokes the simpler world of only yesterday.
