The Novel Is Dead Because James Comey Killed It

Why don’t you write a book about this crime, counsellor?

By Jude Russo, managing editor of The American Conservative and a contributing editor at The New York Sun.

There are in fact offers you can’t refuse. The excellent editor of this publication promised me a princely sum if I reviewed James Comey’s new crime novel. I don’t read crime novels, and I have a fairly dim view of the FBI director turned lefty celeb. But here we are, dear reader: I can be bought.

My first dip into Comeymania was as an embryonic journo in 2017, when my editor at the Washington Free Beacon sent me out on a bright, hot day to cover the local-interest angle on Comey’s June 8 appearance before Congress about the FBI’s antics during the 2016 election. A number of bars had advertised special menus and drink promotions for whoever would come watch C-SPAN in their establishments, and the boss thought this would make for some good local color. My main substantive finding: Union Pub is just as bad in the morning as it is in the evening.

At that time, about a month after he had been relieved of his position by President Donald Trump, Comey seemed a strangely papery character—a basically boring New Jersey Irishman in the wrong place at the wrong time, an amateur artist working in the medium of bad management decisions. The left hated him; they thought the publicity around the Hillary emails case cost her the election. The right hated him; the public was still in the throes of the Russiagate fever kicked off by the Bureau’s Hurricane Crossfire escapade. He seemed unhappy.

This is America, though, and the most recent thing you did is the thing people remember. (Hence the strange warmth among bien-pensants liberals toward George W. Bush, who through my entire childhood was called a war criminal, an idiot, a Nazi, a babykiller, and so on, but expurgated those sins in his retirement by appearing to get on well with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.) Comey got his induction into the Liberal Pantheon, albeit on a lower altar than Obama or Anthony Fauci, and has been spending his time since cashing checks and working the Chautauqua circuit. I can’t blame him for that; I reckon he can be bought, too.

As a man with a fair bit of time and fame on his hands, it’s only natural that he’d heave his talents into the realm of literature. In a 2023 interview with The Washington Post after the publication of his first crime novel, he announced, “I want this to be my job.” Since then, he has churned out a book a year. Comey is a fit 65, and book writing is not dangerous or taxing work; the world of American letters can safely look forward to some 20-odd more installments in the Comey corpus. A solemn and awesome thought.

Were I a conscientious reviewer, I’d have read Central Park West and Westport, the two Comey productions before this year’s FDR Drive, and spent some time worming my way into the literary mind of James Comey. In fact, I am a mercenary who somewhat desperately needs to buy new tires for his minivan, so I decided speed in filing was the ticket; my insights, such as they are, will be drawn solely from FDR Drive. If there are any Comey fans reading this—unlikely for more than one reason—I beg their pardon if my quick and dirty approach to the brief has left me with an insufficient grasp of the author’s virtues. Although I suspect that’s unlikely, too.

I guess it’s time to tell you about the book. FDR Drive is a topical novel, a relevant novel. A novel about a gaggle of racially and sexually diverse federal prosecutors—let’s just say the dramatis personae would make a pretty good private-school admissions brochure—who come together to lock up a far-right podcaster who is inciting his followers to attack people.

The podcaster is basically a Chicken McNugget of people Comey doesn’t like too much. He’s named Sam Buchanan, which combines the names of “Sam Francis” and “Pat Buchanan.” I guess it also near-rhymes with “Steve Bannon” if you say it quickly. He has floppy brown hair like Tucker Carlson. He’s a southerner who went to Harvard, decided there was a future in pandering to the dispossessed masses, and set about ordering them to commit various hate crimes. He’s pretty uniformly terrible—even his lead defense lawyer hates him and yuks it up with the prosecutors when he gets the chance—so the guys and gals at the Southern District of New York don’t have too much trouble clapping him in irons and packing him off to the big house for the rest of his earthly days.

It’s not what you’d call a thrilling read. Comey is careful never to inspire any doubt about Buchanan’s guilt; the book is mostly preoccupied with ancillary questions about just how guilty he actually is in each particular case, and with procedural trivia about the engines of justice. Buchanan confesses his guilt halfway through the thing, and suspense is eked from the barren narrative stone of whether the confession recording will be permissible in court. (It is.) There are just enough loose ends after the gang locks Buchanan up—dark indications of an ever-vaster right-wing conspiracy, a terrorist attack outside the UN—to write the agent’s pitch for next year’s installment, which will also doubtless be named after yet another B-tier Tristate geographic feature. Herald Square? Teaneck? The Cross-Bronx Expressway?

I’m a broad-minded fellow, and I don’t think it’s fair to make a book stand or fall on its plot; a book can convey other, more subtle pleasures. But I’m afraid the writing isn’t very good, either. The basic fault is that Comey, liberal icon and perpetrator of crime fiction, is inescapable; the reader is constantly reminded that he is reading James Comey writing a crime novel. The effect isn’t unlike watching the excruciating on-screen antics of Daniel Day-Lewis in the autumn of his career: You no longer see his characters, but you see him, acting. 

Some concrete points are in order. First, Comey has the tic of popping his head into the frame and explaining—occasionally at great length—points of technical exposition. A modest instance:

“I’m happy to call upstairs to your ADIC,” she said, using the acronym for the Assistant Director in Charge. The New York office was by far the FBI’s largest. Unlike most field offices, which were headed by a Special Agent in Charge, New York was led by an ADIC—pronounced, despite the irresistible jokes, as “a dick.”

It’s scarcely better when Comey tries to slip this sort of thing into the dialogue: 

Judge Norman shook his head slightly and began to say something, but Matthew Parker interrupted from his seat, speaking with his head turned slightly toward his cocounsel standing next to his chair. “The objection is withdrawn, Judge. Some members of this trial team are apparently unaware of Rule 104(a), under which the rules of evidence do not apply to a suppression hearing, except for legal privileges, which are not relevant here.”

Real sock-puppet stuff (on which more anon). This is a shame because the technical material is often itself interesting—that is the going theory of the legal procedural subgenre, after all—but the start-stop, tour-docent cadence begins to grate, and a lot of this stuff is simply extraneous bits of local color taped onto the narrative. Especially in genre fiction, leaving out the inessentials is one of the criteria that separate the men from the boys—think about how stingy John le Carré was with descriptions or explanations that do not pertain directly to the plot. Here is one of the main problems of the celebrity author: Few writers learn good expository technique without some brutal lessons in the cutting room, but no editor who enjoys his salary is going to take a meat cleaver to the celebrity author’s text. Exposition is hard, but alienating your moneymaker is harder. 

More difficult even than exposition is dialogue, although the stakes in genre fiction are lower—bad dialogue won’t kill momentum the way badly done exposition will. But a similar problem arises: Comey can’t or won’t do the police in voices, so he shoehorns in a bit more of James Comey, liberal celebrity, writing a crime novel. Here’s an investigator talking to a woman who was recruited to the FBI through a diversity outreach program:

“Just glad you signed up,” Benny continued, “no matter whatcha look like.”

“And I’m glad you’re around too, and let me add that there’s nothing wrong with big white men on the job, even though there’ve been way too many of you guys over the years—no offense.”

Benny was smiling now, lifting both hands in the air, palms facing Jessica. “No offense taken. I get ya. You wouldn’t believe how modern I’ve gotten.”

It gets worse when Comey is trying to be funny. A little further on:

“If this was some Muslim dude saying the shit Buchanan’s been saying—with bodies fallin’—FBI’d be on him like white on rice.” He paused and grimaced. “Wait, is that racially insensitive?”

“No, it is not,” Jessica said, chuckling. “Most rice is white. But I appreciate the question. I see the evidence of modernity you mentioned.”

The one ameliorating aspect of this almost parodic rendition of liberal wit is that it makes the almost parodic rendition of right-wing rhetoric less jarring, less overtly partisan. And the right-wing rhetoric is pretty, pretty ropey: “The government has assembled a collection of lying losers to say they attacked people because of Sam Buchanan. They’re a plate of cockroaches, willing to say anything to save their own skins. Luckily, jurors don’t eat cockroaches.” Geez.

Even in small ways, Comey, the liberal celebrity who is sensitive when he talks about identity, can’t get out of his own pen’s way: “He was a huge kid, especially for someone of Italian heritage.” We have a phrase for “someone of Italian heritage”: an Italian. I do not think “an Italian” has been packed off to the retirement home for antiquated slurs; if it has, please contact me at once so that I can get the lawyers working on my big cash-in.

Shabby plotting, poor dialogue, sock-puppet characters: So what does this all add up to? If I were in a generous mood, I’d argue that Comey is trying to say something in response to the big granddaddy of New York crime novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities. As in Bonfire, the prosecutors are putting together a somewhat gauzy case with a high profile and political overtones. There’s the conscientious and occasionally irascible judge character, the detailed descriptions of court buildings and prosecutors’ offices, the vade-mecum explanation of the ins and outs of perp walks, the grotesqueries that pass as banter between lawyers, the fixation on evidence permissibility. Buchanan lives in Gramercy, which is where Tom Hanks’s Sherman McCoy lives in the movie adaptation of Wolfe’s novel. (In the book itself, McCoy lives in somewhat crasser duds on Park Avenue.) FDR Drive in some way is an inversion of Bonfire, an effort to tell a similar story where the prosecutors are the heroes, rather than predatory opportunists on the make. 

I’m not actually feeling terribly generous, though, and the comparison mostly depresses me. For one thing, Tom Wolfe had the good sense basically to dislike lawyers, which is not at all a virtue that Comey shares. Indeed, Wolfe is more than a little mean about all his characters, heroes as well as villains. That’s because Wolfe understands what the novel is and what it does, and here we get to the heart of the problem. 

The political novel, like the novel of ideas, is a contradiction in terms. The novel is a form that is fundamentally about the private person; that simply is what it portrays, the actions and speech (and, for high-flying moderns, the thought) of individuals. The individual person may hold ideologies, may be active in politics or government, but is not in fact primarily an ideological cipher; he has an inner life that precedes ideology, he has moments when he is annoyed or amused at his own theories or at his fellow travellers, he engages in non-ideological activities. Hence the early novel’s fixation on scatology and sexuality, the most private things you can do. 

This is why the socialist realist novel was a failure. It’s also why efforts to cultivate “conservative” fiction, so defined, have failed and will inevitably fail. This is not to say that the ideal novelist does not have a political bent, but that this bent is only expressed through the portrayal of individuals doing and saying things as individuals. Fielding is a staunch Whig, and that is inseparable from his lampoon of the Jacobite Squire Western, but his concern is ultimately with Western the man, the frustrated husband-widower and father, and his dead-ender politics are but one element of that portrait. Nor is Western’s Hanoverian sister spared ridicule; sometimes the people who agree with us are foolish and absurd.

For Comey, the individual is posterior to ideology. Buchanan’s fans are simply stupid and vicious creatures of ideas; they aren’t people. This is not an exaggeration. From a prosecutor’s description of one attacker: “Oh, and he’s stupid as a stone. Drove right past the marked unit before he attacked. If this guy is the kind Buchanan is worried about being replaced by foreigners, Jesus, it’ll be an upgrade.”

The prosecutors are the good guys because they are creatures of different, correct ideas; hence the constant jarring witticisms about racial enlightenment. The courtroom is one of the most ancient setpieces of the novel, not because it is a site of political life, but because it is where the private is brought out for examination, where the private and the public collide. Comey the writer has little interest in this; the courtroom is a place for ideologies to do battle and right thinking to receive its inevitable vindication. This may be more or less successful propaganda, but it’s not good novel writing.

That’s a minor tragedy. Any idiot can write a book, but it is the privilege of already-famous idiots to get them published regularly. Comey can publish his books because publishers have noticed that he’s a liberal celebrity, so people who like liberal celebrities will buy his books. The nature of his preexisting audience is ideological. Of course he will cater to the very reason his audience cares about them. It’s just good business sense. If Comey were to write novels like those of Martin Amis or Lorrie Moore, he runs the very real risk of not selling them because those kinds of novels are not directed toward what his audience cares about. And it is not clear that he has the talent or skill to write those kinds of novels, good novels, novels that people would read irrespective of the public standing of the name on the cover, especially as the market for that kind of thing shrinks year by year. And this is not a criticism uniquely for the left; mutandis mutatis, you could write the same things about Glenn Beck’s fiction.

This tyranny of audience is especially salient for a second- or third-shelf public figure like Comey. Distasteful as he may be, Bill Clinton was the leader of the free world for eight years and a political grandee for longer. Yes, Clinton puts out books that pander to his natural audience’s ideological orientation, embarrassing self-insert thrillers with the ghostwriting committee known as “James Patterson.” But if he instead wrote books about lepidoptery, or collections of loving, Jhumpa Lahiri–style vignettes about poor people in Arkansas, he would still be important and interesting in his own right and would sell books—albeit perhaps not the quarter-million The President Is Missing moved in its first week. Comey, on the other hand, had a single moment gleaming in the sun; he is remembered for one thing, for his 15 minutes of fame on a hot June day that is slipping into the realm of historical trivia. He has to work that angle until he dies. It must be very lonely.

This is troubling. Bakhtin (who is more or less right about everything, and whom I have cribbed shamelessly above) says that the novel is the eternal and irrepressible genre because its structure per se demands constant renewal from the wells of popular life, the way people go around talking and acting. That is certainly true in theory. Bakhtin, however, does not concern himself with the realities of book publishing, the fact that the literary enterprise has been yoked to a business that runs on money and will direct public letters to where money will be found. You can bellow Odi profanum vulgus et arceo to the heavens as loud as you like, but good luck getting published that way; as the margins for publishing grow ever thinner and the reading public ever smaller, the publishers grow ever more intent on what the vulgus will actually buy. And writers write to be read, after all; who wants to play literary solitaire, to pour time, effort, and love into unpublished Quevedan translations of Thomas Browne’s Urne-Buriall? The novel—the proper novel, the novel as it is meant to be—is going the way of Christianity and classical music, technically a going concern but without any place in public life. That seems terribly sad.

But hey, at least we have another two decades of Comeyiana ahead of us.