Beltway belles-lettres

ACCORDING TO Christopher Lehmann, an editor at Congressional Quarterly Weekly, America's current political realities-quagmire in Iraq, White House investigations, a ''dauphin commander in chief striving in countless ways to surpass his father's wan patrician legacy''-are tailor-made for fictionalizing. There's just one problem, he writes in the October/November issue of The Washington Monthly: Since the country's inception, American political novels have suffered from a case of ''arrested development.''

Even the best-known examples of the genre (Robert Penn Warren's ''All the King's Men,'' Joe Klein's ''Primary Colors''), Lehmann notes in an essay titled ''Why Americans can't write political fiction,'' share a childish moral fastidiousness toward the political process; politics is viewed, by many of our authors, as ''a great ethical contaminant,'' which is why they task their protagonists with ''escaping its many perils...with their moral compasses intact.'' The result, Lehmann complains, is two-dimensional writing ''wherein the task of protagonist and author alike is to rise above the subjects that propel character, plot, and literary experience''-a far cry from sophisticated European political novels like Orwell's ''Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' say, or Gunter Grass's ''Dog Years.''

Reached at his Washington office on Tuesday shortly after Senate Democrats forced the chamber into a closed session to demand further investigation into pre-Iraq War intelligence, Lehmann explained why our political fiction is so obdurately bad. ''The myth that politicians are tempters in a garden of American innocence-as opposed to three-dimensional characters who are neither good nor evil-was born in the 1870s during the Grant administration, one of the ripest periods of political corruption we've known,'' he said. ''Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's [1873 novel] 'The Gilded Age' concerned a frontier ingenue who relocates to Washington and is tempted into adultery and murder. And Henry Adams's [1880 novel] 'Democracy' was about a clergyman's daughter corrupted by a politician modeled on James G. Blaine, who became Chester A. Arthur's legendarily corrupt secretary of state....Almost every political novel since has been about innocence tempted and redeemed.''

Asked about ''Dog Days,'' a forthcoming political novel written by his wife, political blogger Ana Marie (Wonkette) Cox, and set partly in Boston during the Democratic National Convention, Lehmann was diplomatic. ''Of course I have to say I think Ana has written a good book,'' he said. ''I can promise you one thing-no one's innocence is redeemed in 'Dog Days.'''

Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail jglenn@globe.com