THOMAS MALLON discusses his new novel FINALE, with JAMES ELLROY

Finale: The Reagan Years (Pantheon Books)

From the author of the acclaimed novel Watergate,  comes a galvanizing new novel about the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president of modern times. 

Finale takes readers to the political gridiron of Washington in 1986; the wealthiest enclaves of southern California; and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev. Along with Soviet dissidents, illegal arms traders, and antinuclear activists, the novel's memorable characters include Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Pamela Harriman, John W. Hinckley, and even Bette Davis, with whom the president long ago appeared on screen. Several figures including a humbled, crafty Richard Nixon; the young, brilliantly acerbic Christopher Hitchens; and an anxious, astrology-dependent Nancy Reagan become the eyes through which readers see the last convulsions of the Cold War, the AIDS epidemic, a clash of ideologies, and a political revolution. At the center of it all but forever out of reach is Reagan himself, whose genial remoteness confounds his subordinates, his children, and the citizens who elected him.

Thomas Mallon is the author of nine novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, andWatergate. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Atlantic, and he was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Vursell prize for exceptional prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.
 
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz,and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers. His newest novel, Perfidia, is the first novel of the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy’s fictional history of Los Angeles during World War II.