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The Floating Island: A Tale of Washington
A treacherous journalist, a bumptiously brilliant grant seeker, representatives from the mysterious Temple of Ray, and the hapless organizers of a presidential campaign interfere with the back stabbing and status-seeking antics at Washington's Division of Evaluation, Training, and Morale
286 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1985
10 people want to read
About the author
Garrett Epps
13 books14 followersGarrett Epps (born in 1950 in Richmond, Virginia) is an American legal scholar, novelist, and journalist. He is Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore; previously he was the Orlando J. and Marian H. Hollis Professor of Law at the University of Oregon.
Epps attended St. Christopher's School and Harvard College, where he was the President of The Harvard Crimson. He later received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a law degree from Duke University, where he was first in his class. After graduation from Harvard, he was a co-founder of The Richmond Mercury, a short-lived alternative weekly whose alumni include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Frank Rich and Glenn Frankel. He also worked as an editor or reporter for The Richmond Afro-American, The Virginia Churchman, The Free-Lance Star, and The Washington Post. From 1983 until 1988, he was a columnist for Independent Weekly (then a bi-weekly). Immediately before coming to the University of Oregon, he spent a year clerking for the Honorable John D. Butzner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Epps has written two novels, including The Shad Treatment, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award, as well as the nonfiction books To An Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, which was published in 2001 and was a finalist for the ABA's Silver Gavel Award, and Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Civil Rights in Post-Civil War America, which was published in 2006 and is the first comprehensive history of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. Democracy Reborn won the 2007 Oregon Book Award for non-fiction, and also was a finalist for the ABA Silver Gavel Award. He has also written numerous articles and editorials in newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
Epps attended St. Christopher's School and Harvard College, where he was the President of The Harvard Crimson. He later received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a law degree from Duke University, where he was first in his class. After graduation from Harvard, he was a co-founder of The Richmond Mercury, a short-lived alternative weekly whose alumni include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Frank Rich and Glenn Frankel. He also worked as an editor or reporter for The Richmond Afro-American, The Virginia Churchman, The Free-Lance Star, and The Washington Post. From 1983 until 1988, he was a columnist for Independent Weekly (then a bi-weekly). Immediately before coming to the University of Oregon, he spent a year clerking for the Honorable John D. Butzner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Epps has written two novels, including The Shad Treatment, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award, as well as the nonfiction books To An Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, which was published in 2001 and was a finalist for the ABA's Silver Gavel Award, and Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Civil Rights in Post-Civil War America, which was published in 2006 and is the first comprehensive history of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. Democracy Reborn won the 2007 Oregon Book Award for non-fiction, and also was a finalist for the ABA Silver Gavel Award. He has also written numerous articles and editorials in newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 21, 2025
This is probably closer to 3.5, but Goodreads doesn't allow half stars.
Epps is a legal scholar who writes regularly for the Washington Monthly -- I am a longtime subscriber. This seems to be his first work of fiction and it was published in 1985, when I was living in the DC suburbs and attending graduate school at Maryland.
The title alludes to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Epps includes multiple references to that classic political satire in the text and in epigraph form. In this case, the author's satire is targeting Washington DC and the young people who struggle to make careers there. As you might imagine with the chosen narrative form, the book is quite critical of the characters and their choices. Mostly, Epps employs ridicule to poke fun at the people (and the government at the center of their lives), but sometimes the situations border on farce. This is particularly true when he focuses on the exploits of a former minor league baseball pitcher who arrives in Washington seeking a grant for his community and a religious/political (?) cult with shady operational tactics and goals.
The main character Gerald Nash seems particularly clueless and the reader observes his career and personal life rise to very high heights, then fall after an election causes him to sacrifice too much of his time, dignity, and professional status. His roommate, introduced as an underemployed lay about, eventually transforms in the other direction. That character obtains enormous rewards after rewriting an analytical piece by altogether reversing his original argument.
By the end of the book Epps is targeting Washington's then-new infatuation with Reagan-style conservatism, with its emphasis on the private sector and various hypocritical views on tax cuts and budgets. In the era of Donald Trump it all seems kind of quaint even as there are echoes of familiarity in the rhetoric from 40 years ago. I laughed out loud a number of times.
Epps is a legal scholar who writes regularly for the Washington Monthly -- I am a longtime subscriber. This seems to be his first work of fiction and it was published in 1985, when I was living in the DC suburbs and attending graduate school at Maryland.
The title alludes to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Epps includes multiple references to that classic political satire in the text and in epigraph form. In this case, the author's satire is targeting Washington DC and the young people who struggle to make careers there. As you might imagine with the chosen narrative form, the book is quite critical of the characters and their choices. Mostly, Epps employs ridicule to poke fun at the people (and the government at the center of their lives), but sometimes the situations border on farce. This is particularly true when he focuses on the exploits of a former minor league baseball pitcher who arrives in Washington seeking a grant for his community and a religious/political (?) cult with shady operational tactics and goals.
The main character Gerald Nash seems particularly clueless and the reader observes his career and personal life rise to very high heights, then fall after an election causes him to sacrifice too much of his time, dignity, and professional status. His roommate, introduced as an underemployed lay about, eventually transforms in the other direction. That character obtains enormous rewards after rewriting an analytical piece by altogether reversing his original argument.
By the end of the book Epps is targeting Washington's then-new infatuation with Reagan-style conservatism, with its emphasis on the private sector and various hypocritical views on tax cuts and budgets. In the era of Donald Trump it all seems kind of quaint even as there are echoes of familiarity in the rhetoric from 40 years ago. I laughed out loud a number of times.
Displaying 1 of 1 review