Word: cavanaugh
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...Cavanaugh's wife leaves him at the end of this political novel. She says she will be spending her time in Los Angeles at her public relations job. "All that'll console me," says Cavanaugh, who has a granitic and totally unsupported optimism, "is that you'll be able to keep your tan." The lady replies: "The pool at the apartment is too close to the road." That is a George Higgins touch. No minor mercies admitted...
...City on a Hill is a departure for Higgins. It is not a thriller, and the characters are middle-class people. Cavanaugh works for a Boston Congressman named Sam Barry who fought U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. But now it is the '70s: Barry does not realize that he has outlived his issue. What he does know is that '76 looks like "Jackson and Ford, which I do not want." He sends Cavanaugh off on an exhausting political swing trying to gain support for an idealistic Democratic Senator. No one gives a damn...
Higgins is not a good political novelist, at least in the traditional sense. Nothing much actually happens. But perhaps the author wants to say that politics is a lot of stale talk. Watergate flows in the book like so much flotsam. "Liddy had 50 Minoltas," remarks one character idly. Cavanaugh is amused by the fact that Vatican money financed the Watergate apartment building: "Maybe I should pay closer attention to what Monsignor Lally writes in the Pilot...
...years-are rare, and the fan of earlier books like The Friends of Eddie Coyle wishes there were more. Missing too is the sheer busyness of Higgins' gangster population, those lowlife figures that are highly polished miniatures. Half the new book is paragraph after paragraph spliced by "Cavanaugh said." But the substratum that marks all Higgins' work is intact: a dark, unpanicked vision of people being shuffled around, losing out-and talking about...
...after the December dinner, he sent some of the guests' observations on crime to the Domestic Council. Two weeks later Ford agreed to use several of the ideas in a forthcoming message to Congress. "A lot of those ideas were generated by Goldwin's planning," says James Cavanaugh, deputy director of the Domestic Council's staff...