Nixonland

The town I grew up in, the city of Orange, was very close to Yorba Linda, where Nixon was from before his family moved to Whittier, and I tend to think of it in retrospect as part of "Nixonland." But that would be "Nixonland" in a different sense from that used in Rick Pearlstein's fantastic book of history of the sixties and early seventies. I don't know whether the adjective to apply to this epic is "Tolstoyan" because of its scope and moral vision, or something more comic because the times inherently have an aspect of slapstick and Rabelaisian excess. Either way, the book is an epic, the best recollection of all the insanities of the era I've seen. When I started reading the book a couple of months ago, I read (or skimmed through, rather, looking at the pictures) Barry Miles' book Hippie in parallel. Nixonland was a terrific antidote to the fundamental dishonesty of looking at publicity photographs and self-presentations as history; though on the other hand, the Miles book provided pictures where they were wanting in Pearlstein's, so all in all the less substantial and more one-sided book was still helpful. But Pearlstein's book is a non-fiction novel about both the character of Richard Nixon and the character of American democracy. He allots responsibility between the hippies, the liberals, and the right-wingers in a way that seems to me fundamentally just, though because he does it through storytelling, perhaps being deliberately reminiscent of the sixties' New Journalism (certainly Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson come to mind ) I'm not sure he can claim to have done so as a historian rather than as a brilliant novelist.