Q&A: Author Jeffrey Frank on 'Trudy Hopedale'

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TRUDY HOPEDALE, THE PROTAGONIST of Jeffrey Frank's "Trudy Hopedale: A Novel," ($24, Simon & Schuster) is a Washington fixture on the way out, the audience for her TV talk show dwindling, her B-list hostess status about to get bumped down a grade. No one knows whether her catty pal, vice-presidential biographer Donald Frizze, is one of the chattering class's most eligible bachelors or one of its most confirmed.

Meanwhile, Trudy's husband, Roger, an increasingly distant foreign service has-been, has penned one of those Washington thrillers defined by stylistic ineptitude and ham-handed raunch. Currently a senior editor at The New Yorker, former D.C. journalist Frank has crafted an amusing sketch of people whose Fourth of July barbecue invitations are met with a certain amount of trepidation.

» EXPRESS: Were you at all concerned that the denizens of official Washington are, to some degree, self-satirizing?
» FRANK: I suppose that's part of the challenge, but they are real people to me.

» EXPRESS: Roger's favorite writers are, as he calls them, "the two Johns." How plausible is the pairing?
» FRANK: I do know people who are that oblivious, sure. I don't know anyone who has tried to combine the styles of John Updike and John Grisham before.

» EXPRESS: Roger's prose is rather striking. How much of his book did you complete?
» FRANK: Obviously, I never intended to write a bad novel called "Desks of Power," but I really thought I had to write more than I was going to use.

» EXPRESS: You set your own book in a kind of pre-Sept. 11 limbo. It's actually sweet to think back to the days when the gravest threat to the republic was adultery.
» FRANK: There's no way to avoid this feeling of impending something coming along. We all know that the week after it ends, the whole country's going to change. And how it's changed, I have no idea yet. I'd be afraid to touch that at this point.

» EXPRESS: You imply that the culture of Washington was such that nobody in power could possibly have been prepared for what was coming.
» FRANK: Sure, and I think also people who had proximity to people in power were far more interested in their proximity than in anything the people in power might be up to.

» EXPRESS: There's a running gag about Dick Cheney being potentially another in a series of do-nothing veeps, because no one knew who he was.
» FRANK: The truth was that when I was writing it, Dick Cheney hadn't become fully "Dick Cheney" yet. And I realize that's what's happened — he's become a more important character than I intended him to be.

» EXPRESS: Are all the vice presidents Donald studies — Garret Augustus Hobart, Levi Morton, Alben Barkley — real?
» FRANK: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

» Olsson's, 418 7th St. NW; Thu.,7 p.m.; 202-638-7610. (Gallery Place/Archives-Navy Memorial)

By Glenn Dixon for Express
Photo by Jon Reis/Simon & Schuster