Wallace

You might imagine why I picked this year to finally read this classic political portrait, but the further I got into it, the fainter the echoes of Trumpism became. Wallace is a portrait less of a type than a person, written by a fellow Southerner from within the very moment (the tumultuous spring of 1968) it was describing. On the surface, it's a comedy, punctuated by Frady's delightful flurries of adjectives sizing up his "undersized, stumpy, brisk" subject and his cronies, but the tragedy of his "great dark original threat" is everywhere implicit in this dispatch from a moment in time that doesn't seem so far from ours.