A Nixon Man: A Novel

Winner of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Award for best new novel

"My father was a Nixon man. Before that he'd been a Goldwater man. On most nights he could be found roaming the house like a ghost, wearing a tattered robe, reading about Ike. But on November 7, 1972, he wore his suit and tie well past midnight."

Thus begins a charming yet realistic coming-of-age novel as seen hrough the eyes of a young boy in San Francisco in the early 1970s. A Nixon Man is a funny, perceptive look at the life of a family holding on during the turbulent Watergate years. It is a story of eccentric heroes, necessary secrets, and innocent schemes gone awry, all told by a precocious eleven-year-old Jack Costello.

The year is 1972. Richard Nixon has just won his second term in office. Jack is sure the President will be around another four years, he's just not sure his family will last that long. In San Francisco, the epicenter of change for a generation, an unlikely cast of characters converges: Jack's inexplicable parents, the hippies who live next door, a sister who can never grow up, and an ill-tempered pet monkey... A Nixon Man filters them all through the charming, frequently bawdy wit of its narrator.

Inspired by the Watergate hearings on TV, Jack sends away for his very own bugging device through an ad in a comic book and unwittingly sets in motion a tragic chain of events. By taping and cataloging his own family's phone calls, he discovers an adult world at least as confusing as his own, but only when he finds out more than he wants to know does Jack understand what it really means to be a Nixon man.

Watergate, the red mud of Vietnam, the fiery, nationwide orgasm of the Apollo missions, A Nixon Man resurrects an era that was over before anyone understood it through the tender, often hilarious voice of an unexpectedly wise child.