Gate City

by Michael Davidow

In the first volume of his award-nominated Henry Bell trilogy, author and lawyer Michael Davidow delivers both a tour-de-force of reportorial fiction and a profound exploration of morality and faith, all overlaid on the founding story of modern American politics: the victory of John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960.

Two advertising executives from Los Angeles get caught up in that year’s election: Jack Mercer, native Hawaiian, wealthy and idealistic, and Henry Bell, Ohio-born, a professional fixer for the Rockefeller organization. Their superiors throw these men together to defeat a case of blackmail involving Nixon’s finances. Mercer enters a nascent scheme to elect film star Ronald Reagan to the United States Congress, roping him even further into the shadowy world of California’s money men. Bell roves from Canoga Park to Santa Monica to Chicago and beyond, with artists, surfers, and spies for company.

And their actions are paced by a mysterious white paper from the RAND Corporation about game theory in the atomic age, which seems to be predicting their every move. Because Mercer and Bell are not just helping to elect Richard Nixon as president. They are chasing the delta velocity of history. And every man’s history ends with his own death.

Join these characters on their epic journey into the dark heart of America’s past. GATE CITY: when you run out of choices, all that’s left is the truth.

A finalist for The New Hampshire Writers Project's "Book of the Year Award" in fiction, 2016.

228 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2015

About the author

Michael Davidow was born in Boston and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire. He graduated from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan School of Law. After working in both Boston and Washington, D.C., he returned to New Hampshire, where he practices criminal defense. He and his wife Catherine have one son.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent novel. It tells the story of several men, primarily Henry Bell and Jack Mercer, and their involvement with the conventions leading up to the 1960 U.S. Presidential election. There are a lot of interesting ideas and philosophical questions in the novel and they are discussed by various characters so you see multiple sides. The style of the writing reminded me of classic Los Angeles noir (think Raymond Chandler) which kept the story from getting bogged down in the philosophy. Early in the novel a man (in a suit and tie) walks across a beach carrying a surfboard which is a fabulous image and set a tone for this character that held for me through the book. The next volume in the story of Henry Bell is Split Thirty which I look forward to reading.

[Jak60 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here's the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Gate City.
The main Good thing of the book is the rather original approach to the genre of political thriller; you won't find here the usual bunch of politicians, lobbyists, bagmen and lackeys plotting political plots. Gate City offers more multifaceted situations, wrapped up in an old-style hard boiled atmosphere. Politics is more the backdrop against which the characters (all 3-D and very well developed, with a depth and complexity that make them quite intriguing) move than the central issue of the story. The reader will be taken through the advertising world, cocktail parties, fortunes and misfortunes of marriages and quite a lot of introspection.
The Bad: the prose, this tormented and tormenting prose will not leave the reader from the first through the last page of the book...going through the book was like through a jungle with a machete; a rather nervous writing style, a weird use of punctuation, cryptic references to sobriquets or acronyms, broken sentences, and what have you. Often times I had to go back and re-read a sentence or an entire paragraph trying to make sense of it, as it looked completely disconnected from the context - often times unsuccessfully.
The Ugly point of the book was that, at the end of it, I was unsure of what the whole story was about; I was left with a mixed feeling, as on one side I really liked the Good parts of the book, and at the same time the Bad and the Ugly brought me almost to drop the book more than once.
I am probably crazy enough to keep on going and reading the sequel of Gate City, Split Thirty...stay tuned....

[Mirjam]

“Being Jewish means loving something that’s gone. Your parents, your grandparents, the place they came from. Jerusalem itself. Creation.”