What fiction writer – if any – could have conceived of Sarah Palin without completely blowing the boundaries of reality? Dickens? Shakespeare? Ruth Rendell? In children’s fiction, maybe, where a parodic lunatic still has its place. It’s not really in grown-up literatures nature to have stone cold villains, coal-black embodiments of evil. Serious literature has no shortage of killers, molesters, kidnappers, cannibals, misanthropes, black widows, bloodsuckers, pederasts and politicans…and there are plenty of literary counterparts to modern assholes (change Italy to Iraq in Catch-22, and Milo is Dick Cheney and Colonel Cathcart is George W), but of the snidleliest whiplashes ever to have bound sweet damsel to train track, has any serious writer of novels ever conjured up a sub-literate rube from a weird, frozen tundra, a vicious “hockey mom” to 5 terrible children who shoots wolves from helicopters? Or a character as farcical as “Anne Coulter”, or as grotesque as Roger Ailes?

Roger Chillingworth from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn, and Newt Gingrich.

Roger Chillingworth is a creepy, insular, quasi-intellectual of enormous social ineptitude, unable to fit in with the physical world. Married to a much younger woman, Chillingworth is a man deficient in human warmth, unable to engage in equitable relationships, who inspires respect for his knowledge but fear for his weird, bitter moods. His crippling resentments twist his soul, mutating him into a true madman, a “…mortal who has taken a fiend’s office”. His twisted stoop, deformed shoulders that contort into a grotesque state of irregularity, his eyes burning with fiendish determination, Roger’s worth is beyond repair. Abandoning any hope of finding happiness, Chillingworth becomes incapable of feeling anything but rage, spite and revenge, seeking the deliberate destruction of others rather than a redress of wrongs. Fat, deformed Newt Gingrich traffics in resentment against elites, exploiting race-based resentment toward poor Americans and the peculiar rage of white males. So consumed with resentment and hate towards the president, Newt attacks the very concept of happiness, “even in victory, the candidate of gloom”. His ashen wife – 23 years his junior – at his side and wearing the A of adultery, nods Stepfordianally as her husband’s rage spews forth. “Happiness in the 18th century meant wisdom and virtue, not hedonism,” Gingrich says without a scintilla of irony. His all consuming hatred towards Obama literally deforms Newt’s already hideous self into a grotesque heaving mountain of rage. Gingrich doesn’t just oppose Obama, he resents the fact of his existence.

Chillingworth is sabotaged when the object of his rage is gone. Having lost the body on which he has preyed, and having lost his own soul in the process, his potency is vanquished and he dies, unsaved.

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