I
IRAN PAYMENT FOUND DIVERTED TO CONTRAS; REAGAN SECURITY ADVISOR AND AIDE ARE OUT. This was the six-column, all-caps headline on the front page of the New York Times on November 25, 1986. It marked a turning point in what would come to be called the Iran-Contra affair, but the political scandal was so tangled that it never seemed to reach resolution. The security advisor, John Poindexter, and the aide, Oliver North, referenced in the Times headline would later be tried and convicted on various counts—conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury, destroying documents, and bribery among them. Both men’s convictions would eventually be overturned.
There are a few data points everyone can agree on. In 1985, seven Americans were being held hostage in Lebanon by Iranian terrorists. Iran, at war with Iraq and under an arms embargo, needed weapons. In Nicaragua, a group of insurgents—the Contras—were battling the Cuban-backed Sandinista government. The Reagan administration was interested both in freeing the hostages and helping the anti-Communist Contras, but was having a devil of a time doing the first, and had been blocked by Democrats in Congress from openly doing the second.
One can imagine a conspiracy theorist connecting these dots—only, in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction twist, this was no mere theory. Weapons were funneled to Iran through Israel, apparently in the hope that the gesture would inspire the release of the hostages (it did, sort of: three hostages were released after the sale, though three more were later captured); money from the sales was funneled to the Contras. In the fall of 1986, a transport plane supplying the Contras was shot down and its pilot, the sole survivor, revealed that he had been working closely with two CIA handlers; that’s when the scandal really started coming to light. But no one was ever really held accountable. Since his conviction was overturned, Oliver North, for one, has run for Senate and written bestselling books.
II
Helen Atherton, the protagonist of Karen Olsson’s All the Houses, is a teenager when her father, Tim, is called to testify about his own possible participation in Iran-Contra. Tim’s involvement is minimal enough that he is downgraded from “subject” to “witness,” and isn’t even mentioned by name in newspaper recaps of the congressional hearings, but serious enough that it derails his marriage and career and so, because this is Washington, more or less his life. The novel begins later, when the adult Helen, a failed screenwriter living in LA, moves back to DC temporarily after her father suffers a heart attack. By this time, Tim is an adjunct professor at American University teaching night classes and sending faxes to senators unlikely to respond. (The fact that the novel is set in 2004 makes the faxing seem only slightly less tragic.)
For a while, Helen lives with her father, who tells her it’s not too late to apply to law school (“Are you going to just … just sleepwalk your way through life?” he asks). She runs into her older sister Courtney’s high school boyfriend, Rob, and, for lack of anything better to do, begins a passionless, on-and-off relationship with him. She buys bi-stretch pants at Talbots, her stab at a Washington-appropriate makeover. She rents out a dingy apartment in a slowly gentrifying neighborhood and strikes up a friendship with Nina, a teenage girl, and her single father. At Thanksgiving, Helen and her younger sister Maggie trek to Whole Foods. Helen offers to help her father write a memoir and, when he rebuffs her, begins work, intermittently, on a novel loosely based on his Iran-Contra experiences.
It is precisely because All the Houses mimics everyday life that the arc of its plot (like the arc of the scandal its protagonist attempts, somewhat lackadaisically, to unravel) defies summary. Olsson creates moments of tension—Helen tells her sister about her dalliance with Rob, the conversation described as like “draining a wound”—and then allows them to fizzle, stubbornly refusing to offer resolution. Events Helen interprets as important turn out not to be; casual decisions bear sinister fruit. The novel’s rhythms are so uncannily familiar that the reader’s relationship with her own loose-ended life threatens to infect the narrative. Reading All the Houses while existentially frustrated, I grew infuriated: why was Olsson refusing to give me the neat through-lines I demanded? Reading it on a good day, the novel proved less confrontational, the human clutter it mirrored back something to be admired, rather than vaguely terrified of.
Helen wants to move forward, or at least to think seriously about how she might begin to do something along those lines, but she remains ensorcelled by the past; if she can figure out what happened, she imagines, perhaps she can figure out what happens next. “What had my dad done,” she wonders, “who had he been?” When Tim refuses to collaborate on a memoir—which is not entirely surprising—she is undeterred. “If he chose to keep quiet,” she reflects, “I would go on trying to piece it all together, assembling fragments and figments.”
And so she circles back, again and again, to memories from her childhood, examining them first from one angle and then from another, probing them, with an adult’s perspective, for hidden meanings she might have missed as a girl. For instance, what was happening at that seemingly innocuous backyard barbecue to which her father and his best friend Dick Mitchell, a deputy assistant secretary of state, invited the “Saudi ambassador’s right-hand man”?
If Helen herself is a case study in the dangers of inaction, her father and his faxes offer a lesson in the dangers of trying too hard. Helen’s account of his downfall begins to assume the shape of a novel, and the story she tells shows that Tim’s involvement in Iran-Contra is less about ideology than it is about overcoming a feeling of impotence. Tim almost quit his job at the NSC before the scandal started. But then he notices Mitchell flirting with a reporter he himself has been nursing a crush on, and the spike of jealousy convinces him to stay in the job and double down.
Small human dramas, translated onto the world stage: this is the organizing principle beneath the deceptively fragmented surface of Olsson’s novel. It is also, her novel suggests—and convincingly—part of the secret history of foreign policy. “Here were both the grand mystery of government and its little human movers, with their travel mugs,” Olsson notes, “so small compared to the massive buildings.” To try to definitively connect the two—the grand mystery and the little movers—would be, the image suggests, somehow physically impossible.
III
“President Reagan said today that he had not been in full control of his Administration’s Iran policy.” The first line of the Times article points to the question congressional hearings were not able to answer, the question that kept the Iran-Contra narrative inscrutable then and, perhaps, the question that has doomed it to relative obscurity now: What did the president know and when did he know it? Reagan was aging, in and out of the hospital for colon cancer treatments. The guns-for-hostages trade, Helen explains, was spearheaded by “a few bureaucrats and a gang of freelance old hands,” men who “were in government now but not of it, no sir.” Documents were destroyed before they could be subpoenaed. It was an “ultimately indigestible scandal,” both because not enough was known, and because we knew too much: Dots, after all, are easier to connect when they are fewer in number. Whatever logical narrative thread ran from the White House down to South America through the Middle East was lost in the shredder that Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s secretary, said she and North had jammed. “I placed a call to the Crisis Management Center,” Hall recalled in sworn testimony before a Senate Select Committee, describing the night she and her boss had been temporarily thwarted in their attempts to cover their tracks by a piece of inadequate office machinery. “A gentleman by the name of J.R. came over and shook the bag.” It’s a detail that would not be out of place in Olsson’s novel, which teems with the kind of quotidian debacles that might or might not change the course of history—an individual’s, a family’s, a country’s. Fourteen-year-old Helen slices her finger open trying to cut up a watermelon at a poolside barbecue; a transfer of funds is or is not facilitated. Helen herself flip-flops on the question of what the stitches she got one summer afternoon in the mid-1980s might have meant, geopolitically. If slicing fruit in suburban Virginia might affect politics in the Middle East, couldn’t anything? To discern the precise significance of anyone’s role in the broader narrative, including one’s own, becomes very difficult. It’s an argument for inaction. Or, more cynically, an argument for incuriosity.
Mistrust of government did not begin with Iran-Contra, but you could argue that the peculiar coupling of that mistrust with disinterest did. At the end of 1986, polls found that only 14 percent of Americans believed that Reagan hadn’t known that money from arms sales to Iran had been diverted to the Contras. And yet, his approval rating hovered above 40 percent throughout the scandal; by the time he left office, in 1989, it had rebounded to 63 percent. Whatever it was Reagan knew or didn’t know, the public, it seemed, couldn’t be bothered to care. You sense a weariness, an essentially defeatist attitude, in the face of so many details of ambiguous import. Today, it often seems as if conspiracy theories about about President Obama’s birthplace, religion, or Marxist leanings have greater traction than the real and more troubling questions about the current administration’s relationship to warrantless wiretapping, drone warfare, and torture.
IV
Helen’s timid hope, at the beginning of All the Houses, is to figure out what role her father played in Iran-Contra, a defining event in her family’s narrative, if not the nation’s. It is no spoiler to say that she does not manage even to reconstruct the story of her own family’s dissolution. “I lost track of my three-act structure,” Helen admits. “I no longer knew who the antagonists were.” She’s referring to Iran-Contra, but the sentiment applies more generally.
At best she is able to get answers to a few isolated personal questions. Whether it is or is not enough is beside the point: That is all Helen, all the reader—in this novel, and in her own life—are ever likely to get. At the end of All the Houses, Helen goes back to LA. Her story does not leave you feeling hopeful, exactly, except in its suggestion that the passage of time in itself can sometimes inspire hope. The past, known or unknown, might not wholly define us, and this means that it might be possible to decide to start to think seriously about what happens next.
Miranda Popkey is a writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
