Skewering the Hill with heart and humor

I for one am mighty relieved to find out that humor genes did not completely bypass the Al Gore family. Recessive though they may be, they shine forth in the DNA of the Gores’ middle daughter, Kristin, who made her funny bones as an editor of the Harvard Lampoon and a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” where her work included a sly, deadpan “presidential” speech delivered by her father.

Her second comedic novel of Washington, D.C., is “Sammy’s House,” the sequel to “Sammy’s Hill,” which was well received -- “witty,” “engaging” -- on its merits and not because reviewers recalled the Wrath of Harry. (In 1950, Margaret Truman’s vocal recital was savaged by a Washington Post music critic. Margaret’s father sent him a letter declaring, “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”)

Gore doesn’t need Dad to stick up for her. “Sammy’s House” is an amusing insider’s turn on a place that takes itself way too seriously. And by amusing, I mean truly amusing, not “D.C. amusing” -- just as the book makes the distinction between a “real-world friend” and a “D.C. friend.”

Washington looks hilariously alien to those of us who are on the outside looking in; if it didn’t, Jon Stewart would still be stocking shelves at Woolworth’s. But how amusing can it appear from the inside, especially to someone like Gore, whose family has been through the thresher more often than an acre of Iowa farmland?

“Sammy” is Samantha Joyce, and whatever Gore’s titles may suggest, she’s not in Potomac real estate; she’s a health policy advisor to a senator turned vice president in the Wye administration. Although she labors well down on the power chart (despite her mother’s insistence that Sammy is running the country), we know, thanks to a certain White House intern, that anyone can grow up to become president -- or undo one (a route that has nothing to do with Sammy’s own ascent up the big-shot ladder).

Subscribing to the laugh-or-die rule, Sammy is in her late 20s and possessed of charming quirks, such as self-deprecation, mild hypochondria, a death-touch when it comes to pet fish and sensible Midwestern values that Washington hasn’t yet derailed.

Her bosses view the approaching midterm elections with dread; the president’s party does not control Capitol Hill, which makes for rough slogging on such matters as affordable prescription drugs, a big issue on Sammy’s agenda.

She has given up a snake of a speechwriter boyfriend for the dreamboy Charlie, a Washington Post reporter whose abrupt transfer to New York means endless text-message misunderstandings. Sammy has to keep White House secrets from Charlie, including one that ends up altering the course of presidential history. Not everyone in the White House is so scrupulous: Someone is leaking minor but nasty items to a Drudge-like website that loves savaging the administration. The daughter of Big Green Al Gore must have relished making her plot turn in part on the exposure of the corrupt Trojan Lion group, a firm that writes big checks to scientists to craft sham studies on global warming and evolution so flat-Earth politicians can quote them and stymie real science.

A Beltway brat, Gore has a sardonic sense of the write-what-you-know dictum. A nonfiction book by someone with her political pedigree would send insiders straight to the index, looking for their own names. The beauty of a novel is that you’ve got to work to find the reality parallels, and there are plenty, among them a president who dramatically forswears his favorite vice (demon rum), a loyal vice president who uncomplainingly saves the president’s bacon, a doting and protective first lady who relies on a handwriting analyst to vet the White House staff, and a movie star who loves dabbling in politics only slightly less than he loves himself.

Don’t tell me you can’t figure those out.

On top of all that, Gore has convinced me that the White House turkey is routinely sedated for the big pardoning ceremony so it won’t put up a fight. Sammy looks upon the drugged turkey amid the late-November crowd of lame-duck politicians and sees “a festival of incapacitated poultry.”

The pacing of “Sammy’s House” is alternately dawdling and hasty, though, and Gore contrives some bits of shtick -- like an encounter with a camel -- that read like part of a screenplay pitch. (“Sammy’s Hill” is already on its way to the big screen.) And there are a few labored moments: Gore feels impelled to explain why BlackBerrys are called crackberrys (duh) and occasionally reports that Sammy reacts to some event “as usual,” an unnecessary shortcut in a nearly 400-page book.

“Sammy’s House” would have more savagely comic moments, but less heart, if the author were someone who didn’t give a damn for anything but the laugh line. Gore can’t cut her storytelling loose to embrace equal-opportunity mockery; her paternal genes prompt her to take policy and the public weal seriously.

So even when her good guys are acting bad, they can’t be hopelessly evil, just caddish or weak. If she’d wanted a protagonist who didn’t care one way or another about who wins as long as she prospers, Gore could have made her Sammy a lobbyist -- or a D.C. madam. But like Sammy, Gore would undoubtedly sooner sleep with her own doomed fishes.

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Sammy’s House

A Novel

Kristin Gore

Hyperion: 384 pp., $24.95