FACE-TIME.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter
• Position: Review

FACE-TIME by Erik Tarloff Crown Publishers, $23.

WHEN I WAS INVITED TO review this book, I was already so predisposed to like Face-Time that I had mentally packed it as beach reading for my upcoming post-impeachment vacation. My advance enthusiasm for this comic novel had been whetted by a combination of affectionate reviews, and the droll pedigree of author Erik Tarloff, a Hollywood screenwriter who had been treated to a spouse-of-an-insider (his wife is Laura Tyson, the former head of the Council of Economic Advisors) view of Clinton's first term. Adding to my anticipation were the broad outlines of a plot that seemed an over-the-top summation of all White House sex scandals: What is it like when it is your own live-in girlfriend who is the one having the affair with the president?

Maybe my high expectations for Face-Time were unfair to Tarloff, who by all accounts is a nice guy. But his novel on the printed page never came close to matching the one that I had been savoring in my imagination. Unlike, say, Christopher Buckley's laugh-out-loud classic, Thank You For Smoking, Tarloff's novel barely triggers a wry smile, let alone uncontrollable giggles.

Of course, humor isn't everything to Monthly readers, especially if a novel limns a deft portrait of life along the corridors of power. Here again Face Time falls exasperatingly short, despite the clever wordplay of its title. (In Washington lingo, "face time" normally refers to the ultimate coin of the realm --direct face-to-face access to the president). But while Tarloff does have some interesting insights about the sexual allure inherent in modern presidential power, he repeats them every 20 pages or so without ever moving on to another level of truth.

The story line is tersely established in the five-page opening chapter. Ben and Gretchen are 30-ish political operatives who met and fell in love while working on the winning presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. Charles Sheffield, a married politician who, aside from one glaring weakness, boasts no discernible similarities to Bill Clinton. Now Ben and Gretchen have been rewarded with White House jobs (he's a presidential speech-writer and she works in the social office), share an apartment near Dupont Circle and boast "an ideal Washington life." That is, aside from what Ben, the novel's narrator, describes as "one awkward fact: Gretchen is fucking the president of the United States. And I don't know what the hell to do about it"

Nearly...