When Bart Schneider set his new novel, The Man in the Blizzard, at the 2008 Republican National Convention, he had no idea the truth—a show placed on hold while everyone waited out a hurricane—was going to be almost as strange as the story he came up with. In fact, for a while there, it was looking like Schneider almost pegged the VP nomination, as his novel has a scene where the Minnesota governor shows up at a public mass birthing session that doubles as an anti-abortion rally, thereby securing the nomation.
“Of course, I hope Pawlenty gets it,” Schneider wrote last week. “How often does one get a chance to look prescient? It looked unlikely, back when I turned in the final draft of the novel. I told myself that that was alright. If Philip Roth and Michael Chabon could write alternative history, I could write alternative present. That was my poetic license.” So close, and yet so far…