SOURCE: Walker, Martin. “A Novel Spin on Campaign '92.” Washington Post Book World XXVI, no. 3 (28 January 1996): 1–2.

In the following mixed review, Walker commends the authenticity and ambition of Primary Colors.

Jack Stanton, the central character of this stunning political novel [Primary Colors], is a roguish Southern governor with an extraordinarily powerful and ambitious and foul-mouthed wife. He has a compulsively roving eye for other women, endless charm and a genuine obsession with policy as well as politics as he runs for the Democratic presidential nomination through the primaries of 1992. He battles through recurrent scandals over women and over his opposition to the Vietnam war. They nearly sink him in the New Hampshire snows, and again in the Florida sunshine, and yet again in the ethnic stew of New York. If all this sounds familiar, he is also running against characters recognizable as senators Paul Tsongas and Bob Kerrey...