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A Sense of Perspective
Bathing With JFK follows a bored Houston lawyer whose youthful fascination with John F. Kennedy has left him longing for the kind of extraordinary, consequential life he imagines JFK led. What inspired the idea for this book, and where did Austin Grant first come from?
While much of the chaos captured in the book was manufactured, the bored lawyer/JFK-adoration parts were real. It is sort of where I was back then. When one is young, personal limitations that seem so self-evident in later years don’t even make a blip on the screen. Like Austin, in my 30s I was hoping for an escape of some sort, and starting Bathing With JFK seemed a potential exit route. Though, as is usually the case in life, it didn’t come to fruition until decades later, when I no longer needed an escape. Life.
The campaign in the novel is chaotic, excessive, and often ridiculous, but it also exposes how political campaigns actually operate. What aspects of political culture were you most interested in satirizing?
Primarily the difference between what a politician says in front of a camera and what they say behind it. I have known a few of them, and my advice is that if there is one you particularly look up to, avoid getting to know them.
Martin is one of the novel’s most loyal and compelling characters. What does Martin provide Austin that Austin cannot provide himself?
Martin provides Austin with a sense of perspective and a view of the future that is longer than the life of the present cocktail. I have had a friend much like Martin for over 50 years who, at appropriate junctures, has guided me and chided me. Austin’s clumsy expressions of love for his friend wrote themselves, as I’ve had many such feelings in my own life. (Although one of the inside, practical jokes of the book is that my real-life Martin was the one always meeting the girls while I stood around and for the most part watched.)
What does “living a big life” mean to you now, and has writing this novel changed your own understanding of what makes a life consequential?
Ironically, now in my 60s, living a big life means living a small one: fewer people, fewer events, fewer ambitions. As far as a consequential life, I’d go with surrounding yourself with the right people and seeing things, especially difficult things, through.
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Austin Grant has spent his life chasing the next thrill—booze, women, and just enough lunacy to keep boredom at bay. A trial lawyer with charm to spare and a lack of discipline to match, he’s never had much use for purpose—until a grudge against a powerful state senator pushes him into a race he has no business running.
What begins as revenge quickly spirals into a chaotic, no-holds-barred campaign filled with missteps, imbecility, and moments of surprising brilliance. As Austin stumbles toward something resembling conviction, he’s forced to confront the wreckage of his choices—and the people he’s hurt along the way.
Set against the sharp-edged backdrop of Texas politics, this is a story of mindless ego, casual recklessness, and perhaps second chances—where winning the race may mean losing everything that matters.
Bathing With JFK
Ken Wall’s Bathing With JFK is a sprawling political satire, legal comedy, and character-driven comic novel set in 1990s Texas. Its narrator, Austin Grant, is a bored Houston lawyer whose youthful fascination with John F. Kennedy has left him craving the kind of grand, consequential life he imagines JFK lived. Austin’s solution is to challenge entrenched state senator Buzz Laughlin, a conservative celebrity with deep pockets, a talent for spectacle, and a long memory. What follows is an unruly campaign filled with dirty tricks, disastrous appearances, false arrests, sexual complications, and enough alcohol to alarm a distillery. The book establishes Austin’s central contradiction early: he genuinely wants to live boldly and serve a purpose, but he’s spent years confusing appetite, attention, and performance with significance.
The novel is funniest when it turns campaigning into organized chaos. Austin’s team includes Martin, his brilliant and fiercely loyal lifelong friend; Sarah, the sharp-tongued strategist who rarely lets him escape his own foolishness; and Linc, whose enthusiasm produces its own memorable trouble. Their underfunded operation lurches from door-knocking humiliations to media ambushes while Buzz’s machine answers every setback with another attack, arrest, or strategically placed umbrella. Wall understands the theater of politics, particularly the gap between what candidates say, what consultants arrange, and what voters actually notice. The episodes are deliberately excessive, but they’re tied together by a perceptive idea: a campaign can reveal a person even while teaching that person how to conceal himself.
Austin’s voice drives this satirical comedy novel, and readers who enjoy shameless first-person narrators will find plenty to work with. He’s quick, observant, vulgar, self-dramatizing, and often much more perceptive about everyone else than he is about himself. His endless jokes create a breathless rhythm, though the book’s length and appetite for digression can make some comic routines feel extended beyond their strongest beat. Still, the humor gradually gains emotional weight through Austin’s relationships with Martin, Marie, and his father. Martin gives the story its warmest friendship, while Marie refuses to become a prize waiting at the end of Austin’s adventure. Her clear-eyed understanding of him keeps the romantic comedy elements grounded in consequence rather than wish fulfillment.
That consequence is what gives Bathing With JFK more staying power than its wildest scenes initially suggest. Austin enters the race hoping to become larger than life, wins through a mixture of luck, nerve, loyalty, and questionable tactics, then discovers that victory can arrive after the things that matter have already begun slipping away. The closing pages resist an easy redemption and land on a fittingly uneasy note, with Austin finally recognizing happiness and responsibility just a little too late. As a political fiction novel, legal satire, and boisterous story of male friendship and delayed adulthood, Bathing With JFK is profane, energetic, and unexpectedly melancholy. It’s ultimately about a man learning that living a big life and living a meaningful one aren’t automatically the same thing.
Pages: 479 | ASIN : B0H73MJLQS
