Matalin & Carville tell their story in 'Love & War'

Love & War

Twenty Years, Three Presidents, Two Daughters and One Louisiana Home

By Mary Matalin and James Carville

Blue Rider Press. 352 pp. $28.95

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Reviewed by Paul Jablow

A therapist friend of mine reports telling this to many of his patients: "Go ahead. Try to explain whom you fall in love with. Waste my time and your money."

I doubt he has treated James Carville or Mary Matalin, separately or together. But the statement might well apply to them, perhaps America's most famous odd couple. The enduring merger of Mr. Left and Ms. Right might seem surprising on the surface, particularly in view of the current political polarization that has huge sections of Congress unable even to speak the same language, let alone share beds, bathrooms, and cooking utensils.

Below that surface, it's not that tough to figure out.

The two political operatives are adults who don't sweat the small stuff and not a lot of the big stuff. They avoid talking politics, let alone arguing about it, although they clearly have found going to each other's victory parties was about as appealing as a root canal without anesthesia.

Outside of politics, the marriage is seemingly untroubled by some of the issues that can divide the less fortunate. No intrusive, judgmental families. No serious disagreements about raising their two daughters. No major financial problems. No serious illnesses, although Carville's ADHD is no picnic for Matalin. And, seemingly, no need by either party to violate the Seventh Commandment (although that, of course, can be the result of problems rather than the cause of them).

So Love & War doesn't really cut it as a marriage manual. Not that it was seriously intended as such. Mostly, it seems have been written to amuse us and make the authors a nice piece of change. Nothing wrong with either of those things. Carville is a good writer and Matalin a very good one. Both are very funny and not afraid to laugh at themselves. And neither is at his or her best when talking about politics, although large swaths of the book are basically political memoirs.

Carville is unconvincing, to put it mildly, when he speculates that 9/11 would not have happened had Al Gore been president rather than George W. Bush.

Equally discomfiting is Matalin's fawning adulation of Dick Cheney: "I was so disappointed by how [his] brilliant, seriously comprehensive energy policy was received by hydrocarbon-hating tree huggers." Her account of the march into the Iraq war somehow avoids the predictions of its cheerleaders that American troops would be greeted with confetti instead of roadside bombs.

More interesting is Matalin's depiction of the human side of the two Bush presidents and of Cheney, and Carville's reminiscences about Clinton, zeroing in on his technique of walking into a room, instantly spotting its most vulnerable occupant, and going over to talk to them. Matalin's account of trying to turn herself into a TV personality is also hilarious.

One of the most intriguing characters in the book, though, isn't a person. It's a city: New Orleans. Carville's roots are deep in Louisiana, and the couple's decision to leave Washington and move there is treated with sensitivity and nuance lacking in much of the book.

"By late 2006," Carville writes,

I think Mary and I both were growing a little weary of D.C. Twenty years in the pressure cooker will do that to you. I'd fought and clawed to get there. I'd had a good run. I wasn't mad at anybody. But I was kind of losing interest in the conversation.

The move isn't easy, particularly since their two daughters were quite happy with their old life. But the couple tell the story in a way that makes the sections on it a virtual guidebook to New Orleans outside the French Quarter, with added excursions into topics such as home furnishings, sleep patterns, Louisiana State University sports, and the couple's love-hate relationship with animals. (Her love, his hate).

Matalin is also moving in describing her conversion to Catholicism:

I wish - I pray - I could convey what the gift of Grace is and means to me, but it's one of those things; if you don't get it, you just don't get it. And if you do get it, you know it is inexpressible, though some great minds through history have given expression to it, which sparkle and delight and stop you in your tracks. St. Thomas Aquinas . . . .

We do learn that she grew up in suburban Chicago and that her mother ran a beauty salon and her father was a steelworker. On the whole, however, we learn far less of her past than we do of Carville's (son of a postmaster and a schoolteacher, who grew up in Carville, La., named after one of his grandfathers; was a Marine and an accomplished lawyer before going into political advocacy).

Which is unfortunate, because, as my shrink friend says, how you grow up can have a major effect on what happens when you get married.

Mary Matalin and James Carville: "Love & War"

7:30 p.m. Monday at the Central Branch of the Free Library, 1901 Vine St.

Tickets: $6 for simulcast tickets (auditorium tickets sold out).

Information: 215-567-4341 or www.freelibrary.com

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