SOURCE: Wall, James W. “Inside the Campaign: Disillusioned.” Christian Century 113, no. 7 (28 February 1996): 219–20.

In the following review, Wall discusses characteristics about the author of Primary Colors that he believes can be gleaned through information found in the novel.

The literary question of the season for Washington insiders is: Who wrote Primary Colors, the thinly disguised fictional examination of the early days of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign? The anonymous author will not achieve the historical status of Deep Throat, the anonymous tipster who provided news about the Watergate cover-up, but the work is an impressive account of campaign spin-masters at work.

Primary Colors is an example of what feminist scholar Lila Abu-Lughod calls “situated writing”—writing that emerges from a distinct perspective. In a foreword to Janet Varner Gunn's West Bank Memoir, Abu-Lughod says that the term “situated writing” derives from the work of “feminist scholars, anthropologists, historians of science...