The Nomination is a posthumously released novel by William Tapply, and a terrific one it is.
Thomas Larrigan is about to be nominated by the American President to fill the seat on the U. S. Supreme Court of an associate justice on the verge of retirement. He, of course, needs to be vetted before the inevitable Senate confirmation hearings, and even before his nomination is publicly announced. At first blush his bona fides appear to be impeccable: A youthful-looking 59 years old, handsome despite his black eye patch, he was a Marine lieutenant, decorated Vietman vet, who had been awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart; he has a reputation as an “intrepid prosecutor, tough on criminals, elected twice as crime-busting District Attorney, once as state Attorney General, self-respected Federal District Court judge, loving family man.” [It doesn’t hurt that he occasionally plays golf with the President.]
As the president is told, “Larrigan’s perfect. Almost too good to be true.” Of course, as the author points out, “if you looked close enough, you’d find a skeleton in every closet in America. If you looked close enough, you wouldn’t find anybody who’d qualify for the Supreme Court. Old dusty skeletons, long dead. Skeletons can’t tell stories.” Some of those skeletons are not quite dead, it soon appears. In the process, several lives are linked in disparate ways, some characters confronting their past, others running from theirs, including events from the Vietnam era that had/have life-changing effects. The author skillfully weaves these threads together, and when this reader thought she knew what was coming, unexpected plot developments proved me wrong.
Others caught in the web of the vetting process include Jessie Church, who had worked for 18 months as an undercover cop in Baltimore, now working as a private investigator; Simone Bonet, cult film goddess who has dropped out of sight; Mac Cassidy, celebrity ghostwriter recovering from the death a year earlier of his wife and now trying to raise their teenage daughter by himself; among others. Each of these is a fully fleshed-out character brought to wonderful life in the hands of Mr. Tapply. This is a beautifully written tale of love and loss, full of suspense but still managing to tug at the heart. Nearing the end of the book, I did something I had never done before: I had gripped the bottom corner of the page so tightly in my fingers that a small piece was ripped out.
I felt it might be appropriate to include here the following, contained in an epilogue to this novel, in part wrapping up the tale and spoken by Mac Cassidy, but which I suspect were also Mr. Tapply’s thoughts about his own writing process: “Eight hundred words a day, through sleet and snow and flu-like symptoms. That’s how books got written. Not in great bursts of inspiration. You wrote a book one painful sentence at a time. Eight hundred words a day, which was a lot of sentences, whether it took an hour or ten hours.” It is our loss that this is the last book from this author we will have the pleasure of reading. It is, obviously, highly recommended.
