The Overton Window is a novel by Glenn Beck. That should be cause for alarm, but it gets worse.
If you've ever watched one of Beck's Fox News performances, you'll feel that "The Overton Window" opens on familiar territory. In his author's note, Beck refers to this book as "faction" and explains: "As you immerse in the story, certain scenes and characters will likely feel familiar to you. That is intentional, as this story takes place during a time in American history very much like the one we find ourselves living in now. But while many of the facts embedded in the plot are true ? the scenarios I create as a result of those facts ? are entirely fictional. Let's hope they stay that way."
Actually, what's embedded in that passage is the key to the Beck rhetorical method, which is to assert the outrageous or malevolently incredible, followed by an aw-shucks denial that he means what he just said. In an interview this week with USA Today, for example, he was asked to predict the next presidential election and replied, "That assumes we're going to have an election?. Just kidding."
Right.
The protagonist of "The Overton Window" is Noah Gardner, a dashing young bachelor about town ? New York ? working as an executive in the high-powered public relations firm founded by his ruthlessly villainous father. Dad, it quickly emerges, is the living prime mover in a plot stretching back nearly 100 years to subvert American constitutionalism and supplant it with the tyranny of an economic and political elite, while throwing everyone ? including right-to-lifers, "tea party" activists, Libertarians and NRA members ? into concentration camps. (Hint: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt are bad guys in this imagined history.) Noah, however, falls for the daring, beautiful Molly Ross, who is working as a temp at the agency and is part of an insurgent group dedicated to resisting the conspiracy.
This is as good a place as any to provide the inevitable sample of the book's prose, so here's Noah's first impression of Molly:
"Something about this woman defied a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory. Without a doubt all the goodies were in all the right places, but no mere scale of one to 10 was going to do the job this time. It was an entirely new experience for him. Though he'd been in her presence for less than a minute, her soul had locked itself onto his senses, far more than her substance had."
You really can't make this stuff up.
Anyway, the malleable Noah and his liberty-loving squeeze manage to penetrate ? well, they use his card key ? an office where the conspirators have loaded into the computers, what else, a PowerPoint presentation on their whole dastardly scheme to take over "finance, energy, labor, education, infrastructure, media, emergency management, law enforcement and continuity of government." While it loads, Noah delivers a chilling soliloquy on the evils of cap-and-trade. Once the plot is up on the screen in horrifying schematic detail, Noah and Molly get a full sense of the conspiracy's scope ? "Education: Deemphasize the individual, reinforce dependence and collectivism, social justice and 'the common good.'"
Ultimately the couple realizes that the plot is about to move to its final stage by using a stolen nuclear weapon to stage a phony terrorist incident, triggering an economic collapse, the abolition of all civil liberties and a final descent into authoritarianism conducted by Gardner père et al. Ultimately, Noah finds himself desperately trying to save freedom ? and Molly. Gosh.
In a foreword, Beck notes that his thriller belongs in a category called " 'faction' -- completely fictional books with plots rooted in fact." He attaches an afterword of nearly 30 pages that contains citations to references in the story: information on the financial bailout, unemployment, measures to ensure government operation after a disaster and the like. He laces his plot with these facts in the same manner he employs them on his TV show, to lend credence to his fantasy of a nefarious government scheme to subvert the Constitution.
But enough seriousness -- this is a thriller! Anyone who has tuned in to Beck's show knows that he is sometimes joined on-screen by best-selling thriller writers such as Vince Flynn and James Rollins. In his foreword, Beck notes his love of the genre and acknowledges that "the goal of most thrillers is to entertain." Sadly, he seems to have learned little from his thriller-writing friends.
Thrillers often are marred by laughable prose, but few have stumbled along with language as silly as this one. When Gardner's son, Noah, meets patriot Molly Ross early in the novel, Beck writes: "Something about this woman defied a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory." It gets worse: When Noah notices that a few strands of Molly's hair have fallen out of place, Beck tells us, "these liberated chestnut curls framed a handsome face made twice as radiant by the mysteries surely waiting just behind those light green eyes."
The suspense of "The Overton Window" comes largely from wondering when the thrills will begin. There's the obligatory prologue murder, but then the pulse of this novel flatlines. In place of thrills, we get entire chapters in which characters lecture on the rightness of their viewpoints. A moment of cliche action erupts when a New York City taxi with Noah inside jumps a curb and nearly hits a hot dog stand. Later an atomic bomb goes off, but the mushroom cloud settles without so much as a dusty throat for anyone.
Far more entertaining is the cameo appearance by former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who leers at Molly in an elevator and then gives Noah "a man-to-man stamp of approval indicating their shared good taste in fine feminine company," after which Noah helpfully explains to Molly: Spitzer's "a total horndog."
A sure-fire killer of a thriller is predictability. Yet from the moment Noah lusts after Molly on page 9, we know he will have his epiphany, defy his terrible father and come over to the cause. It takes a while, but Noah finally makes the leap in his last utterance before the epilogue. His conversion is meant to rouse dormant patriots among Beck's readers and bring them onto the battlefield: "We have it in our power," Noah proclaims, "to begin the world over again."
Beck portrays his do-gooders as peaceful to the point of sappiness -- they live in simply furnished cabins with handmade quilts and "things [that] . . . had been built and woven and carved and finished by skilled, loving hands." But this earthiness is grounded in a fervor, an obsession, to save America at any cost. Molly and her crowd assert their Second Amendment right to bear arms and are well stocked with weapons. They even make their own ammunition. Their insistence on nonviolence appears as disingenuous as anything out of the mouth of their nemesis, the insidious manipulator of reality Arthur Gardner. "There's nothing I wouldn't give up to defend my country," Molly says. "No matter how hard it might be, there's nothing that's in my power that I wouldn't do."
The danger of books like this is that radical readers may take the story's fiction for fact, or interpret the fiction -- which Beck encourages -- as a reflection of a reality that they must fend off by any means necessary. "The Overton Window" risks falling into the tradition of other anti-government novels such as "The Turner Diaries" by William L. Pierce, which became a handbook of extremists and inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. As Beck tells his soldiers in the voice of Noah: "Put up or shut up . . . go hard or go home. Freedom is the rare exception . . . not the rule, and if you want it you've got to do your part to keep it."
