Capturing the Faustian politics of this year’s Presidential race. Illustration by John Gall; Source: Scott Olson / Getty (Trump); Brooks Kraft / Getty (Clinton)

Ideologues will tell you that the personal is political, but a novelist will tell you that the political is personal. Politics does transfiguring and terrible things to the people who practice it, enough to provide any fiction writer with a career. In my own novels, I often rendered those practitioners from the viewpoints of lesser figures—not Joe McCarthy but a young Senate staffer—until I went “inside” Richard Nixon for a novel about the Watergate years. I discovered that I had never felt more comfortable in a character’s skin. This no doubt says plenty about me, but it also says something about him: Nixon was entirely palpable. One could hop in and drive him like a big-finned fifties car, as his self-hatred ran a race with his contempt for others, and raw need sometimes manifested itself in a weird tenderness.

Thoughts of Nixon inevitably bring one to Hillary Clinton, so often described by the adjective formed from Nixon’s name. If I were compelled to produce a book of fiction about the 2016 election, Hillary would be my full-throated choice for its principal point-of-view character. I’m with her, because I feel right at home in the dank gymnasium of her mind, where she is forever teaming up and exercising and rearranging the different parts of her personality, benching whichever ones have no usefulness to the present moment, the latest disaster or crisis, and telling all the others to suit up. If Nixon was shredded and poisoned by each of his pre-Presidential defeats, Hillary died a little with each of Bill’s victories, one after another, in Arkansas and beyond, all of them forcing her to stand at a spot on the stage that she knew she should not be occupying. Her life was supposed to take place behind the lectern, not beside it, hoisting the hand of the man who’d just got the votes.

By the time it was “her” turn, it was psychologically too late, just as it was for Nixon in 1968. In his case, winning could not make up for losing; in hers, fifteen years of jury-rigged self-fulfillment cannot make up for the previous twenty-five of self-suppression and worse. “I’m with her” is not just her slogan; it’s her condition. She is always still with all the other compromised, renovated, and discarded Hillaries, the way the supposedly “new” Nixon remained fused to the “old.” She is also bursting with Rodhamized literary doppelgängers, from Dorothea Brooke and Carol Kennicott to Tracy Flick.

This is no normal quadrennial clash of titans that we’re living through, but, even so, wouldn’t a sort of equal-time rule apply to a novel about 2016? Would I not be obligated to enter the—what should I call it—consciousness of Donald J. Trump? The answer is no, and I can honestly maintain that I’m asserting not a point of personal preference here but a literary imperative. Trump lacks even the two-dimensionality required in a sociopath; the emotional range is as impoverished as the vocabulary. Trump simply advances, like the Andromeda strain, a case of arrested development that is somehow also metastatic. Even “the Donald” sounds more like an analogue than like a person.

Literature offers an explanation for Trump’s inability to follow the pundits’ summertime urgings that he put aside the centrifugal id he displayed in the primaries for something more “Presidential” in the general. E. M. Forster memorably said that “the test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way.” Trump cannot surprise in any way; he is a flat character, and to put him in charge of any stretch of a novel, the way a point-of-view character is by definition in charge, would be as irresponsible as putting one of his small fingers on the nuclear button. In truth, I don’t see him functioning as a character of any kind in this novel; he would operate more as a looming anal face, like Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes, hovering over the valley of ashes, in “The Great Gatsby,” or simply as his own late-nineteen-nineties billboard near the Lincoln Tunnel. The sign advertised the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City with an enormous picture of its owner. The slogan? “He’s Got It. You Want It. Come Get It.”

In my novel “Finale,” set during the last years of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, I never, except for a few pages in the epilogue, entered Reagan’s consciousness, not because I felt there was nothing there but because what was there looked so smoky and unseizable. In John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest,” Harry Angstrom muses upon the fortieth President: “You never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself.” I decided that Reagan, who had eluded capture by his authorized-access biographer, Edmund Morris, was best approached from the outside, through puzzled observers, both admiring and detracting, from Nancy Reagan to Christopher Hitchens—rather the way Gore Vidal gave us his novelized version of Abraham Lincoln, in 1984.

Last fall, while on book tour for “Finale,” I was often asked if I planned to write a novel about this election. The campaign to Make America Great Again was still in its infancy, and I would deflect the query with a reference to my actual work in progress, about the second term of George W. Bush. As we got deep into 2016, the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina came to feel almost like refuges. So did the political discourse of the early two-thousands: I invite you, in our current ghost-tweeted political era, to go back just eight years, to the Facebook postings of Sarah Palin, and tell me that they do not now read like a lost volume of “The Federalist Papers.”

My chief wish for the present political moment is to see it turn quickly into a forgotten past, but having already pondered the protagonist’s point of view I find myself perversely, maybe even penitentially, thinking about all the other considerations one would have to give to a novel about 2016.

I see the main action beginning on May 3, 2016, the day Trump placed Ted Cruz’s father atop the Grassy Knoll, won Indiana, and joined Hillary in becoming a “presumptive” nominee. “Presumptive” would be high on my list of possible titles for this novel. It’s a word that’s supposed to pertain to the electorate—it’s their presumption that these will be the candidates—but it seems to apply more to the candidates themselves, with its suggestion of presumptuousness: as Ethel Merman used to sing, aside from the hostess with the mostess all you need to become President is “an ounce of wisdom and a pound of gall.” “Presumptive” also echoes “consumptive,” suggesting an occupational disease that devours the body and spirit.

But, if we start in May, what about the primaries? Am I really going to deprive the reader of Ted Cruz? Yes. Can the book thrive without the low energy of Jeb Bush? The maligned face of Carly Fiorina? Little Marco’s desperate, last-minute adoption of Trump-style crassness? The jiggling pivots of Chris Christie, whose speeches might as well have started the way the Fat Boy in “The Pickwick Papers” begins his story—“I wants to make your flesh creep”? I’m afraid we have no more need of these characters than the electorate did. If they had been able to sustain our interest, they would still be in the newspapers instead of auditioning for this novel and being rejected.