If someone had asked you a few weeks ago whether former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie would ever be depicted as a beleaguered hero in a Michael Lewis book, it would have been reasonable to say the chances were low — lower, even, than Christie’s abysmal approval ratings when he left office earlier this year. Christie, after all, hasn’t done much to endear himself to the American public; early in 2016, his surprise endorsement of Donald J. Trump (who once called Christie a “little boy”) looked like the desperate move of a politician whose office was still smoldering from a payback scandal.

But it’s 2018 in America, where anything can happen and everything is relative, and the opening pages of Lewis’s new book, “The Fifth Risk,” have Christie acting like an upright statesman during the run-up to the 2016 election, hoping to convince a chaotic Trump campaign to devise an orderly transition plan in case of victory. Lewis says this was like trying to persaude Trump that he needed to study for a test he might never take. Christie was soon dismissed from Trump’s team, and the transition proceeded accordingly — which is to say, shambolically. Two years later, out of more than 700 key government positions requiring Senate confirmation, only 361 have been confirmed, and a full 152 have no nominee at all.

“Many of the problems our government grapples with aren’t particularly ideological,” Lewis writes, by way of moseying into what his book is about. He identifies these problems as the “enduring technical” variety, like stopping a virus or taking a census. Lewis is a supple and seductive storyteller, so you’ll be turning the pages as he recounts the (often surprising) experiences of amiable civil servants and enumerating risks one through four (an attack by North Korea, war with Iran, etc.) before you learn that the scary-sounding “fifth risk” of the title is — brace yourself — “project management.”

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

Lewis has a reputation for taking fairly arcane subjects — high finance, sovereign debt, baseball statistics, behavioral economics — and making them not just accessible but entertaining. He does the same here with government bureaucracy, though “The Fifth Risk” feels a little underdone compared to some of his previous books. Two of its three parts appeared as articles in Vanity Fair; the other as an audiobook original. Those pieces might have been written under deadline, but even with extra time to smooth things out, Lewis has elected to preserve some clunkers: Silence is still “deafening,” poverty still comes “in many flavors” and Lewis still decides “to kill two birds with one stone.”