This Tricky Dick is on a new ‘ Crooked’ path

Austin Grossman Mulholland

355 pp.

Richard Nixon, whose career saw him be both tremendously right and wrong about many things, was certainly wrong when he told reporters in a drunken 1962 news conference that they wouldn’t have him to kick around any more.

Nixon’s legacy, cemented in the Watergate burglary- turned- political scandal that drove him from office in 1974, endures. Virtually every two- bit dispute or mini- scandal gets a “- gate” suffix appended to it. Deflategate. Bridgegate. Porngate. Each time, Nixon, who died in 1994, gets another posthumous kick in the pants.

Now with Crooked, novelist Austin Grossman shows we not only still have Nixon to kick around, but there are increasingly weird ways in which to do it. This time, Nixon and other historical figures are thrown into a mosh pit of fantasy in which historical accuracy collides often with a fictional occult world.

A video game developer, Grossman has imagined a joystick- operated Nixon who stumbles into the clutches of both the KGB and an occult group controlled by a kind of Dead Presidents Society steeped in peyote tea. Instead of finding out the truth about former State Department official and accused Soviet operative Alger Hiss, as Nixon did as a young congressman in 1948, Grossman’s Nixon ends up becoming a Soviet pawn, just as Hiss was.

He’s a perfect fit. “My other asset was that, as I discovered, I wasn’t a nice person,” this Nixon says.

While on a Soviet mission to a secret base in Pawtuxet, Mass., Nixon learns of a covert program that evokes elements of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. What Grossman creates is a kind of black arts Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that leads to many of the military’s successes in World War II. Its dark lord is Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former chief Allied commander in Europe and future president who hides his powers behind a mask of grandfatherly geniality.

From there, it’s a battle for Nixon’s soul. Will he cast his lot entirely with the Soviets, including the comely spy Tatiana, or will he join with Eisenhower’s occult forces to grasp the power he has desperately wanted since his childhood among the citrus groves and dusty roads of rural Orange County, Calif.?

We know the answer, although it’s harder for Nixon to decide than we might have imagined. “I wanted everything ( Eisenhower) was offering, wanted it with a panicked desperation, and I decided I would have it,” Nixon says. “I had already done worse for a great deal less reward.”

MARKA KNIGHT