Reimagining the Reagan years in 'Finale'

Reykjavik, Iceland, 1986 — upstairs, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev were negotiating the elimination of nuclear weapons. Downstairs, the Soviet agents were watching "Tom and Jerry" cartoons on VHS.

Thomas Mallon's "Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years" is filled with historical gems like this: little-known tidbits that add texture to the official story.

Mallon spent years researching Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and the reality of their lives in the White House. "Finale" is the second in Mallon's trilogy of novels about Republican presidents; the first centered on Richard Nixon, the next will take on George W. Bush.

In "Finale," he focuses on Reagan's most difficult year, 1986, when the Democrats were about to re-take the Senate, the Iran-Contra affair was about to explode and social issues like AIDS and the crack epidemic were filling the news.

The history is all here, but Mallon isn't afraid to play in his characters' thoughts. He imagines the mental monologues of Nancy Reagan, her self-consciousness, her flirtatious behavior with TV host Merv Griffin.

"If you're a biographer, and you're doing your job responsibly, you have to say 'well, at this moment it is not implausible to think that Nancy Reagan might have thought...' You have to wrap yourself up in the subjunctives," Mallon said. "Whereas when you're a novelist, you just go ahead and have her think that."

While he dives into Nancy's head, he stays out of the head of the president himself.

"I don't know what it says about me, but I had no trouble inhabiting Richard Nixon's point of view and thoughts," Mallon said. "But Reagan was so elusive and mysterious. For someone so charming, he was very remote."

Part of that perceived remoteness came from a medical issue — Reagan's hearing loss. In retrospect, some scholars have attributed his occasional confusion to the onset of Alzheimer's, but Mallon theorizes it had more to do with an accident from his actor days.

"He lost a lot of his hearing in Hollywood when a prop gun went off next to his ear," Mallon said. "He tried to cover for the fact that he literally wasn't hearing what people were saying. He tried to kind of charm his ways through those moments, but they made him seem more disconnected than he was."

In "Finale," Mallon dives into 1980s politics with a historian's eye and novelist's love of significant details. He joined MPR News' Kerri Miller to talk about "Finale" and his research process for his political trilogy.

One thing that made the "Finale" research more difficult than his previous book on Nixon was the lack of an audio archive.

"Oh, to have tapes again," Mallon said. "But of course, we don't have tapes after Nixon — for obvious reasons."