The Washingtonienne
by Jessica Cutler
Hyperion, 304 pp., $23

"HOW SAD IS THAT?" a young female character observes in Jessica Cutler's roman-à-clef, after spotting George Stephanopoulos and James Carville across a crowded Palm restaurant. "Those are the biggest celebrities Washington has to offer, and they're not even attractive."

A brief intake of breath here, the kind that always accompanies a rarely uttered truth (a commodity the novel celebrates), and then, just one line down, Cutler does it again. Washington, D.C., her main character points out, is "Hollywood for the Ugly." It's a place of such limited possibilities that "you can't really get famous working on the Hill. Unless you do something really bad." This is a goal Cutler's protagonist, a world-weary babe with Gucci shoes, innovative sexual habits, and a terrible job on Capitol Hill, is clearly gunning for. In fact, two other characters refer to her as a train wreck, although for most of the book, she is too preoccupied to peer down the track.

Like so many heroines before her, her vision is obscured. After a hot time in New York, she lands, like Gulliver, on a planet dominated by midgets. Nothing about Washington thrills her. The men are pathetic. The drugs even more so, and so difficult to come by that she has to hook up with bike messengers to acquire them. The clothes are dowdy.

Even those in Washington who have managed to achieve some measure of renown, she quickly discovers, are condemned to sort through only the most dispiriting forms of entertainment.

In other words, this is a novel of uncommon candor, humor, and perspicacity, and I loved every page of it.

Those familiar with Cutler's short-lived nom de blog--in 2004, under the alias Washingtonienne, she chronicled electronically and with a fair degree of self-deprecation her voluminous love life ("S--t, I'm f--ing six guys. Ewwww . . . ")--may recall that on its dissemination in mainstream outlets, Cutler was fired from her other job, the one she could actually mention to her parents. Evidently, the office of Senator Mike DeWine, an obviously humorless Republican from Ohio, felt that Cutler couldn't be both a Senate staffer earning $25,000 a year by answering (or in the case of Cutler's alter-ego, not answering) crank letters from constituents and maintain her status as the Samuel Pepys of promiscuity.

But really, why not? It isn't as though these two careers are mutually exclusive. In fact, there was clearly plenty of time, in Cutler's view, to pursue both paths, albeit obviously not with the same degree of zeal. "Do you ever feel like you're not accomplishing anything at all? That's what working on the Hill was like," Cutler writes in her novel. And she should know.

Ever wonder why, when you phone your local congressman, no one, however low-level or clueless, bothers to answer? Cutler's book is full of dialogue that provides useful insights into this problem.