Stephen Poleskie

Review: NOT SUPPOSED TO WIN

Not many stories can hold the reader's interest when the writer gives you the plot and reveals the outcome in the first paragraph; yet in his latest novel, THE THIRD CANDIDATE, author Stephen Poleskie does just that. Using two narrators, the hero, John S______, who we immediately learn has disappeared, and the omniscient narrator, who has no name, but does appear as a character in the book near the end, Poleskie weaves a tale so intriguing that I could not put the book down.

The story of an unemployed actor, who becomes involved in a scheme to rig a Brooklyn congressional election, skillfully contrasts the hero, politically naïve but honest John S______, and his girl friend, Pope Joan, with the villain, his manager, the politically knowledgeable, but dishonest R.A. and the rest of the campaign crew.

Poleskie shows himself to be the master of that ironic esthetic that both embraces and mocks its subject. The book celebrates the political technique of running a "spoiler" while giving the situation a bizarre twist. The actor is only looking for a rent-free apartment when he finds himself cast in the role of a third candidate. When a local TV station begins showing reruns of a TV soap opera he appeared in he gets the name recognition he needs to cause his political ratings to soar. His backers, a mysterious corporation, become worried that their spoiler might actually become a winner, which would never do.

The books most humorous scene comes when a depressed John has a late-night conversation with the expensive paintings, by well-known artists, that have been borrowed to decorate the walls of the penthouse apartment used for his fund raisers. John has difficulty understanding why these things command the prices they do; "more than what a truck load of migrant workers might earn in their lifetime." While the author doesn't mention any names, the descriptions of the various works will lead anyone familiar with the New York gallery scene to guess who the artists are.

While a great deal of sarcasm pervades the text, it functions mainly as a Greek chorus, lamenting the state of the world today. We cheer the good guys, and boo the bad guys; but this book is a tragedy, and in the end the bad guys will win. Poleskie, however, skillfully leaves the reader the opportunity to draw the final conclusion.

Brilliantly conceived and written I cannot help but wonder why this book was not picked up by a major publisher. Is it perhaps because there is a kind of subtle censorship prevalent in the United States today that we are not willing to admit to?

Sidney Grayling

Review

During a primary marked by bowling fiascos, flag-pin debates, and assassination sweepstakes, Stephen Poleskie's "The Third Candidate" could not be timelier. By turns funny and frightening, this book explores the moldy underside of American politics. In a bankrupt democracy that considers thinking elitist and irony treason, this is risky business, partly because no satire can fully do justice to current events.

Feckless John S_____ has escaped his father's used car lot in the Anthracite Region to pursue an acting career in New York City. Unable to wash dishes at Sardi's, much less dine there, he works as a part-time handyman on the Lower East Side--until fate casts him in a farce that plays like a tragedy. Answering a mysterious ad for a rent-free apartment, the John becomes ensnared in a plot to rig a Congressional election. A powerful corporation wants to run the not-too-threateningly handsome young actor as a spoiler.

At first, the masquerade merely bemuses John. He studies antique newsreels of Roosevelt and Churchill, takes elocution lessons to dilute a working-class regional accent, masters prepackaged evasions and clichés for press conferences, and learns to use his charming smile like a mouth guard. But as the cynicism becomes more sinister and his handlers act more and more like his jailers, John rebels and goes off script. When he campaigns in earnest and climbs the polls, the Powers that Be promise to fit John for some heavy boots. And they don't mean Timberlands.

A graphic artist and former barnstormer, Poleskie writes with a Goyaesque eye for the absurd and the grotesque and pilots a giddily aerobatic plot. But the novel works best as a "Pilgrim's Progress" of disillusionment. As our eternal innocent bumbles toward his martyrdom, we encounter a trio of allegorical characters: John's seedy salesman father, who seems a model of moral rectitude compared to the pols and flaks at campaign headquarters; R.A., John's boorish and ruthless campaign manager, who makes Karl Rove seem like Dennis Kucinich; and Pope Joan, the idealistic volunteer who becomes John's Beatrice but cannot save him from hell.

Commenting on the Weimar artist George Grosz, John Dos Passos observed: "A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at ugly and savage and incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible to get relief. He seeks to put into expressive forms his grisly obsessions the way a bacteriologist seeks to isolate a virus or a dangerous micro-organism. Looking at Grosz's drawings you are more likely to feel a grin of pain than to burst out laughing. Instead of letting you be the superior bystander laughing in an Olympian way at somebody absurd, Grosz makes you identify yourself with the sordid and pitiful object."

The same can be said of Stephen Poleskie's "The Third Candidate." Readers will laugh until they sob or sob until they laugh. Not that there's much difference in America anymore.