Lynne Cheney's Wild, Wild West
It's one weird summer when the nation's favorite beach reading inclines to bestsellers by Bill Clinton, the 9/11 commission, John Dean and Tommy Franks
But then there's another book, written by another well-known political figure, and it's a doozy. Throughout its pages are fornication (the heroine with her late sister's husband), incest (half brother knocks up half sister), adultery (the heroine, with her first husband's friend), contraception (by the wed and the unwed) and lesbian couplings (the heroine's sister and an older woman). And incidentally, lynchings, dogicide, cattle theft and robber-baronism.
The book was published 23 years ago, before the author's husband became one of the nation's most influential politicians, and before the author became a Valkyrie in the culture wars. And the author is
It's Lynne Cheney, wife of the Republican vice president. The book is a frontier novel of the 19th century called "Sisters." It's hot, it's sexy and it's out of print.
I could find only 11 copies in all of the nation's public libraries, mostly in red states: four in Wyoming, Cheney's home state, and one each in North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Kansas, Virginia, and Kern County, Calif.
On the Internet, the original 1981 $2.50 Signet paperback has an asking price of $2,999.95 to $25,000, the latter more than the cost of a first edition of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." I have "Sisters." I can't reveal my sources, but my hot copy is now in a secure, undisclosed location. (Thanks, Mom.)
A proposal this spring to reissue the book was deep-sixed by Cheney, whose lawyer explained it wasn't her best work. It doesn't show up in her White House website biography. During the 2000 campaign, she told the New York Times she hoped the book would start "flying off the shelves." Now she doesn't want it to fly at all. What a flip-flopper.
Naturally, demand is in inverse proportion to availability. In March, the New York Theatre Workshop staged a performance of choice scenes. The snicker factor is obvious, with passages like "Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men," and "Eve and Eve, loving one another" in "a passionate, loving intimacy." So is the hypocrisy potential, when both Cheneys and their lesbian younger daughter are laboring to reelect a man who regards Adam-and-Steve nuptials as the death knell for civilization.
