On December 2, 1954, Joseph Raymond McCarthy—swept from his committe chairmanship by a Democratic resurgence in the fall elections—was censured by his colleagues for conduct "contrary to Senate traditions." This novel [Children of Power] is set in Washington in that same watershed December.

Here we meet Joe McCarthy once more, now stripped for us by an omniscient narrator. If you have ever wondered what McCarthy dreamed, this is the place to find out. If you would like to know what he admitted to the priest in the confessional, you can read it here….

Apart from being made to yield … voyeuristic amusements, McCarthy figures here as an issue. He is a childhood friend of Sam Taylor, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and is welcome as Taylor's house guest despite their opposition on matters of principle. The central conflict of the novel lies in an attempt to force Sam Taylor to resign. His toleration of McCarthy is held up as the reason.

Which is, of course, pure "McCarthyism." A group calling itself the Syndicate is formed to topple Sam Taylor….

[The] Syndicate consists chiefly of high school kids, classmates of Sam Taylor's daughter, Natalia at Sidwell Friends school. In a novel that cuts freely back and forth between sets of people, told through a consciousness that fairly caroms among multiple points of view, Natalia is as close as we have to a central character….

The novel is flawed by continual explanation of motives, of relationships…. Natalia is reduced to an illustration of teenage psychology: "She had for years balanced carefully as a young gymnast between her own requirements and the demands made to belong. Now the balance had altered and she was concerned with merging undistinguished as part of the whole."

To dissect a character with the neat thrusts that we so much admire in biography, to sum her up in a telling phrase, is a fine achievement but the wrong achievement. People in fiction reveal themselves through action (including speech and thought). They reflect in the warping mirrors of other people's appraisals of them. To go beyond and explain character is for the novelist to become a scientist, to tease apart and label the parts—to explain character away.

The plot, seductive at first, broadens into melodrama. The week of time that it embraces catches every major character near the climax of a personal crisis. For the sake of simultaneity, some of the subplots require to be spurred on by actions that resist belief….

The story moves swiftly, and the dialogue is remarkable sharp—people really do talk this way. The social milieu is intriguing. We begin to get a sense of the everyday lives of the powerful and famous. And of their children's lives: when a girl is 17, we learn, the fact that her father breakfasts with the President can be the least important thing in the world.

If much in this novel is hard to believe, perhaps it is no more so than the McCarthy era itself…. [It] is valuable to be reminded, as we are here, that a man who gives his name to an age is a shadow—however large, however frightening—of the common human heart.