Irving Wallace's THE PRIZE

The Prize (1962) is prolific author Irving Wallace’s magnum opus on the Nobel Prizes.  Reading a novel by Irving Wallace is like eating potato chips, you know that it's junk but it tastes good and you just can’t quit.

Despite the painless lesson on the history and process of awarding the Nobel Prizes, like every other book Irving Wallace ever wrote, The Prize is a giant soap opera.  The Prize tracks the story of a group of Nobel laureates as they are notified of their prizes and travel to the award ceremony in Stockholm.

The book centers on Andrew Craig, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.  Craig’s wife died in a car wreck a few years before.  Craig blames himself for her death and has sunk into alcoholism.  There are plots and subplots and subplots of subplots.  And there are lots of characters, some of which serve no particular useful purpose other than to allow the main characters to respond to them.  Since this is an Irving Wallace novel, there is, of course, SEX.  Lots of SEX.  This was some pretty racy stuff for 1962.

Claude Marceau, part of a French husband and wife team which has won the Prize for chemistry, is having an affair with an attractive fashion model.  His wife begins an affair with a man that she does not really have any feelings for in order to make her husband jealous and win him back.  Andrew Craig apparently never saw a woman he didn’t try to sleep with - except for his homely Sister In Law that wants to marry him, but whom Craig finds repulsive.

In many respects, The Prize was a conventional spy novel.  The Physics Laureate, Max Stratman, is wanted by the Soviets.  An elaborate plot is developed to convince Stratman to defect.  This plot involves Stratman’s niece, Emily, who was sexually abused by the Nazis in the Ravensbruck concentration camp during World War II, and her father who everyone thought was dead.  Of course, Craig has the hots for Emily and pursues her.  Poor Emily is depicted as trying and failing to get over her emotional problems with sex.  However, Wallace’s alter ego Andrew Craig is there to help her.

Like most Wallace novels, The Prize is an entertaining old pot boiler.  If you tackle it, be forewarned, at 600 pages  it’s about 200 pages too long.  But all, in all, old Irving’s pot boilers still hold up pretty well.

 The prolific Irving Wallace at work (1916 - 1990) 

Irving Wallace's THE MAN

What if a black man had become President of the United States in the late nineteen sixties?  This is the plot of Irving Wallace’s 1964 political pot boiler The Man.

“The Man” is Douglas Dilman, an obscure black junior Senator from a Midwestern State. As a token gesture to quell racial unrest in the country,  Dillman is appointed President Pro Tempore of the Senate.  Shortly before The Man begins, the Vice-President has died of a heart attack.  When the novel begins, the office of Vice-President is vacant.  (Before the passage of the 25th Amendment there was no legal mechanism to fill a vacancy in the Vice-Presidency).  When the President and the Speaker of the House are killed in a freak accident, Senator Douglas Dilman is thrust into the Presidency.

An illustration from the Readers' Digest Condensed Book version of "The Man"

Dilman has been a “yes-man” to the leadership of his political party. (Although the novel never expressly says so, it appears that Dilman is a Democrat).  At first he falls into line with the wishes of the party leadership and the former President’s advisors.

In addition to Soviet incursions into Africa (remember this novel was written at the height of the Cold War) and racial unrest at home, Dilman has plenty of personal problems.  Dillman’s dead wife drank herself to death as a result of depression.  Dilman’s daughter is living in New York and passing for a white woman.  Dilman’s son is a member of a radical civil rights organization which is ready to use violence to achieve racial justice.

An illustration from the Reader's Digest version: 

Black Radical Students protest President Douglas Dilman

Everyone is shocked when Dilman stops being a yes man and vetoes a major entitlement bill, the Minorities Rehabilitation Program (MRP), which has almost universal support among members of the party.  Now Dilman is disliked by nearly everybody: racist whites hate Dillman because he’s black, liberals hate Dilman because he vetoed the MRP, and radical blacks hate Dilman because he’s “an Uncle Tom.”

President Douglas Dilman survives an assassination attempt.

All the stereotypes you would expect are here: the racist Southern demagogue Congressman who leads the effort to impeach Dilman; the black radicals who want try to assassinate Dilman; and the ambitious Ivy League educated Secretary of State who wants to replace Dilman.  Near the end of the novel, a cross gets burned on the front lawn of the White House and a race riot breaks out in Washington.

The Old Guard Washington insiders plot against The Man.

This being an Irving Wallace novel, there is, of course, sex.  The Secretary of State, the debonair Arthur Eaton, who is estranged from his wife, becomes involved with the emotionally unstable daughter of a powerful Southern Senator.  Eaton recommends his mistress, Sally Watson, as the White House Social Secretary.  Ultimately, Sally becomes Eaton’s spy inside the White House.  When she is caught spying by the President, she falls back on the tried and true method of accusing the black man of sexually assaulting her.

Secretary of State Arthur Eaton becomes cozy with Miss Sally Watson

Ultimately, Dilman is impeached by the House of Representatives on trumped up charges.  When The Man was written there had only been one impeachment trial in American History, that of Andrew Johnson in the 1860s.  In light of the Clinton impeachment the comments Wallace makes are very interesting:

His firm belief was that the House members, having enjoyed the catharsis of vituperation, would now realize the historic gravity of the decision they faced.  They would realize that an impeachment in modern times was unthinkable, that the legal instrument of reproof and discipline in the Constitution had become obsolete.  In fact, just the other night, unable to sleep, Dilman had come across the words of an eminent political scientist who had characterized impeachment as a “rusted blunderbuss, that will probably never be taken in hand again.”  Surely, the more judicious of the House members would see that, would think twice before signifying aye or nay.  

Ultimately, like President Andrew Johnson, Dilman is saved from impeachment by a single vote.

The real Man: President Barack Obama

It was fun reading The Man as a time capsule.  Everyone in the novel smokes.  The big foreign policy issue is containing Communism.  President Dilman visits Cape Canaveral to inspect the new Apollo program.

Although Irving Wallace did not write great literature by any stretch of the imagination, reading a Wallace novel is like eating potato chips: once you have a bite it’s hard to stop.  Wallace was a good writer who carefully constructed stories and knew how to sink the hook into the reader.  I enjoyed reading The Man a great deal.  While Wallace was not a great novelist, when a 48 year old out of print novel can still entertain a reader,  I am prepared to say that Wallace was a great story teller.

The prolific Irving Wallace (1916 - 1990)

Thanks to the blog Today's Inspiration for the illustrations from Reader's Digest.

Irving Wallace's The Celestial Bed

I picked up a copy of prolific author Irving Wallace's 1987 novel The Celestial Bed at a used bookstore for three dollars. It looked like it would be a mindless fun read, and for three bucks who can go wrong?

The Celestial Bed was great fun. Because this is one of the most pornographic books which I have read in a long time.

It's the story of Dr. Arnold Freeberg a sex therapist who seeks to cure his patients of their sexual disfunctions through the use of live sex surrogates. A sex surrogate is somebody who, under direction from the therapist, has sex with you and helps you to overcome whatever your problem is.



Irving Wallace (1916-1990)

First, Dr. Freeberg and his sex surrogate, Gayle, are run out of Arizona under the threat of prosecution for prostitution. Under assurance by his lawyer that therapy using surrogates is legal in California, Dr. Freeberg sets up shop in a suburb of Los Angeles. He gets a bunch more surrogates together including a male surrogate for the occasional female patient.

A sex crazed fundamentalist preacher gets his buddy, the politically ambitious District Attorney, to agree to arrest and prosecute Dr. Freeberg and Gayle. But first they send in Chet, a reporter suffering from pre-mature ejaculation, undercover to gather evidence. You get the idea, this a bad soap opera. It's so bad it's positively wonderful.

The Celestial Bed has just enough real information about the history and practice of sex therapy to make the reader feel like he has learned something and not feel guilty about all the titillating graphic sex. The characters are basically cartoonish caricatures. Like Tony, the owner of a chain of Italian restaurants, who launders money for the mob, and likes sex one way: fast, with none of that wimpy lovie dovie stuff. Tony's girlfriend, Nan, is frigid and seeks help from Dr. Freeberg. When Tony finds out that some other guy is banging his girl, somebody's got to die.

The Celestial Bed is definitely not great literature. For a bit of harmless raunchy amusement, however, it's good for a few laughs. It fascinated me thinking about how much the world has changed since the late '80s when this book is set. There were no cell phones, the characters have to stop at the gas station and use a pay phone, there was no fax and no internet (they have to go to the copy shop to xerox reports and then have the copies sent over by courier, how quaint!), and there was no Viagra or Cialis (they have to try to cure impotence the old fashioned way without drugs).

It reminded me how old and dated I am. I was a college undergraduate when this book came out. I wish that we could roll the world back to those times. I guess it's just natural to be nostalgic for the era in which you grew up. This old pot-boiler reminds me of those good times.