NEW YORK (Reuters) – A steamy novel by Lewis “Scooter”
Libby has become a hot item now that Vice President Dick
Cheney’s chief of staff is under indictment.
An inscribed copy of “The Apprentice: A Novel,” which Libby
wrote in 1996 when he was a relative unknown outside
Washington, was on sale on online bookseller Amazon.com on
Monday for $2,400. Unsigned hardcover copies were going for
$700.
Now out of print, the novel tells the story of an innkeeper
apprentice in a bizarre coming-of-age story set in Japan in
1903. It is littered with edgy sexual material and strong
language.
“Wow, who would have thought that clean living, family
values man Scooter Libby was capable of writing such filth,”
said one reviewer on Amazon. Another Amazon reviewer noted its
“lavish dollops of voyeurism, bestiality, pedophilia and corpse
robbery.”
Libby was charged last month with perjury in a special
prosecutor’s probe into how a CIA operative’s identity was
leaked to journalists.
Libby’s writing skills also happened to be displayed in a
widely published letter to reporter Judith Miller of The New
York Times that showed a flair for literary allusion and
ambiguity.
“Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be
turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect
them,” he wrote to Miller as she sat in jail earlier this year
for refusing to reveal Libby’s identity as a source.
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