Book review: Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny's 'State of Terror'
At the start of 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton resolved that she would not respond to Donald Trump’s insults.
Turns out she was just storing up her responses to unleash in her first novel.
There is no shortage of score-settling Washington memoirs, but this must be the first time a major presidential candidate has conducted a political assassination via a thriller. “State of Terror,” written with best-selling crime writer Louise Penny, is part entertainment, part roman à clef and all payback. Lightly cloaked in the guise of fiction, Clinton’s onetime opponent appears in these pages as careless, stupid, dangerous and traitorous.
I’m not complaining. The Thug-in-Chief deserves all the opprobrium he can carry in his sticky little hands, but this marks a striking contrast to the novel-writing partnership between Bill Clinton and James Patterson, who have largely avoided disparaging Trump. Their ridiculous but phenomenally successful thrillers — “The President Is Missing” (2018) and “The President’s Daughter” (2021) — stay comfortably ensconced in Bill’s macho fantasies of himself as a president/action hero/savior. The men have comparatively little room — or stomach — for critiquing other administrations.
The Nasty Women are not nearly so timid. When “State of Terror” opens, the new U.S. president, Douglas Williams, is trying to clean up “the near-criminal incompetence of the former administration . . . a delusional American President and his flying monkeys in the cabinet.” Williams’s disgraced predecessor is President Eric Dunn, “known to even, perhaps especially, his closest associates as Eric the Dumb.” While Dunn entertains sycophants in his Florida compound, the scope of needed repairs to the body politic is staggering:
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“Those left behind by the Dunn administration had the thousand-yard stare of combatants finally detached from the horrors around them,” Clinton and Penny write. “Total loyalty to President Dunn and his decisions, no matter how ego-driven and uninformed and outright dangerous they were, had been demanded.”
The lingering effects of Dunn’s reign become even more clear when three buses blow up in major European cities. As the bodies are being counted, the new U.S. administration determines that these horrific attacks are somehow connected to Dr. Shah, who sells weapons of mass destruction on the black market. Dr. Shah had been under house arrest in Pakistan, but in the days after President Dunn lost his bid for re-election, he insisted that the Pakistani government release him. Now, the world’s most dastardly terrorist is loose again — and his next target is the United States.
The only person standing between America the Beautiful and nuclear annihilation is a disheveled woman wearing Spanx. That’s Ellen Adams, the new secretary of state. “Hair askew, mascara smeared,” Ellen is the tireless, deeply endearing, hilariously unheroic heroine of “State of Terror.”
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Ellen is also the clearest demonstration yet that Bill and Hillary have very different fantasy lives, though both do reimagine themselves with dead spouses, which might be something to explore further in counseling. In his own thrillers, Bill portrays the president as a ruggedly handsome former soldier known for his bravery and marital fidelity. Hillary eschews all that fantastical wish fulfillment and leans into her pantsuit. Secretary of State Adams doesn’t mind letting people think she’s just a dowdy rich woman in over her little head. Such underestimations of her skills give her an edge in high-stakes negotiations.
Another striking contrast is how differently Bill and Hillary regard the press. In his last novel, Bill laments that journalists are craven and untrustworthy. But “State of Terror” is predicated on the honor and hard work of reporters. Before taking on her job as secretary of state, Ellen ran a media empire that produced important investigations, and her son is an international journalist determined to find the truth and protect his sources. It’s as though one novelist understands the importance of the free press in a democracy and the other is still bitter that he got caught with his pants down.
But we’ve got no time to figure that out! The stakes couldn’t be higher in “State of Terror.” Dr. Shah, who sounds like a villain expelled from a Bond movie for being too unrealistic, has been taunting Ellen Adams for years. Now he’s plotting to explode nuclear bombs on U.S. soil. As the new secretary of state, Ellen must figure out who built those bombs and where they’ll be detonated, but the intelligence community is in shambles. “Four years of hiring, of promoting, of rewarding people who’d say and do anything to prop up a deranged President has left us vulnerable,” Ellen explains. “The former administration screwed up everything it touched.”
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With just hours to spare, Ellen flies around the world, courting our allies and enemies — charming the P.M.! wheedling the Ayatollah! blackmailing Putin! She’ll do whatever it takes to stop Dr. Shah from opening the Hellmouth.
It’s wholly ridiculous but consistently entertaining. In an author’s note, Penny acknowledges that after a career of writing crime novels, the idea of tackling a political thriller felt awfully intimidating. But Penny and Clinton demonstrate a sure hand at international intrigue and narrative pacing. (Fans will be happy to know that Chief Inspector Gamache makes a late cameo, too.)
The real key to “State of Terror,” though, is its secret weapon: female friendship. Despite exploding buses and the grim prospect of nuclear annihilation, these pages are leavened by Ellen’s trusty sidekick, a retired schoolteacher based on a real-life friend of Clinton. International terrorists may have all the materials they need for a dirty bomb, but America has these two middle-aged women with a plan.
Honestly, it’s not a fair fight.
Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.
State of Terror
By Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny
Simon & Schuster/St. Martin’s Press. 512 pp. $30
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