Creamy White Thighs
(Novel; political satire)
By Kevin McDermott
4/7/10
Partly complete (about 175 pages)
Creamy White Thighs is the story of a routine traffic stop on a cold Midwestern night that blooms into an epic political drama. It’s a satiric snapshot of America’s sleepwalking media culture in the first months of the 21st Century, before epochal events – the rise of the Internet, the fall of newspapers, the lost innocence of 9-11 – changed everything.
Sitting quietly in the path of those tidal waves is the pressroom on floor two-and-a-half of the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield: former home to Abraham Lincoln, future launch pad for Barack Obama, currently headquarters for a group of bored, frustrated reporters dwelling in the cellar of their profession, competing against each other by day, drinking together by night, waiting for Something Big to happen.
One of them is Garrick Martin, an astronomer at heart who missed his calling and now is stuck in an earth-bound career as a journalist, wondering if this all there is. He writes for a dying newspaper, is stuck in a sleepy Midwestern state capitol, covering a little-noted governor and an inept Legislature. Thirty-four and single, prematurely gray, Garrick’s only real friend is his elderly landlady, who lost her young brother in the Holocaust and is kind enough to tell Garrick the story every morning, in excruciating detail, over metallic coffee.
The politicians Garrick covers are always forgetting who he is. His editor views him as walking confirmation of the decline of journalism. His fellow state capitol beat reporters—a klatch of poorly-dressed under-achievers who spend all their time grinding out the same meaningless political news stories, while making barroom bets on which of them can slip phrases like ``creamy white thighs’’ into print—see Garrick as being near the bottom of their modest hierarchy.
That changes after Garrick watches in horror as a toddler is forcibly removed from the only home he has ever known, the result of a controversial court order. It’s a sight that, in Garrick’s mind, echoes his landlady’s nightmarish past, and sends him angrily seeking justice.
He finds it, in a tip from an old friend, about the judge who ordered the boy’s removal. It begins as a small issue – a speeding ticket – but, fueled by political and journalistic ambition and a traumatic news clip that ripples across the nation, it grows into a national morality play.
