POTOMAC PRINCESS

A congresswoman attempts to get her married boyfriend—a veteran senator—elected to the presidency in this thriller.

Kati Case is a Democratic congresswoman representing Philadelphia, only 37 years old and already in her third term. She unabashedly considers herself a “power-crazy witch,” and after failing to elevate her father, Paul, to the Oval Office, she settles for making him chief justice of the Supreme Court. Now, she’s moving on to yet another kingmaking project. She wants Wilson Burnett, a Democratic senator, to be the next president even though the “beleaguered incumbent,” Daniel Bromwell, is also a Democrat, albeit a despairingly unpopular one. Meanwhile, Kati struggles to make sense of a shiftless personal life—she’s separated from her husband, Sam, a former governor who confesses he’s bisexual, and her current beau, Wilson, remains married to his wife, Amber, who forgives his dalliances. Kati is also carrying on a desultory relationship—really a series of assignations—with Brandon Jarrett, a Republican congressman eager to step out on his own wife. Greenberg assembles a memorable cast of characters, some of them satirically overblown, though delightfully so. For example, Randy Carraway, the mayor of a small town in North Dakota, fisherman, and hockey player, sets his sights on the presidency, too; he’s a marvelously inarticulate man only looking to become a media star. But the plot never quite achieves either the heights of drama or farce—in a political age that produces its own surreal theater, the author’s flights of fancy seem anodyne. Even a dark plot twist involving the possibility of presidential treason doesn’t depart from well-worn pulp fiction grooves. The highlight of the novel is the protagonist, a remarkably capable woman who consistently underplays her potential—she brags to an illicit paramour while hooking up in his home during a party that she’s a “soundless fuck”—but also pines for something more meaningful, a tension delicately portrayed by Greenberg.

A vivid but uneven political tale with a strong protagonist.