Thomas Mallon was a college student when the Watergate burglars got caught in the act. Now, almost 40 years later, Mallon writes novels — and in "Watergate," he has redone the burglary and its aftermath as historical fiction.

The author of the novels "Dewey Defeats Truman" and "Henry and Clara" avoids the crime-thriller approach. Instead, "Watergate" focuses on the personalities involved.

In what will strike many as a curious approach, Richard M. Nixon gets a sympathetic portrayal. So do his wife, Pat, his secretary, Rose Woods, and his Watergate bagman, Fred LaRue.

To be sure, "Watergate" has its negative characters — Bob Haldeman, of course, a sycophantic Henry Kissinger, a calculatingly egocentric Elliot Richardson (who dismisses Gerald Ford as "dumb, affable Jerry"), and an impossibly brash and clumsy Spiro Agnew. At one point, the fictional Nixon points to Agnew and tells Haldeman, "He's driving me crazy."

Mallon's Pat Nixon not only secretly smokes; she also has a secret lover. And watching over the wackiness is the elderly Alice Roosevelt Longworth, imperiously tart.

An early scene is set in Moscow in May 1972, when Pat Nixon contemplates her husband while looking out a window and seeing him with Bill Duncan, a Secret Service man:

"She could see Dick now, staying two steps ahead of Duncan, lost in thought until he'd turn around and say something, half from politeness and half from the need to hold forth. And then, after he spoke a couple of sentences, he'd break away and go it alone for another fifty feet, starting the cycle again. For all his need of an audience, he was happier alone. She remembered him just like this on their wedding day, June 21, 1940. She'd looked out the window of the Mission Inn and spotted him pacing the courtyard, a nervous groom, an hour before the ceremony. The birds had been singing in the branches as she stood there in her lace suit from Robinson's department store and watched him without his knowing it. Money had been so much on both their minds: his mother had made the cake; his brother had picked her up and brought her to Riverside to save the cost of a hired car.

"Next month, June, would be their anniversary. What would Rose be buying for him to give her? Once this trip was over and the two women had a quiet moment together, she'd have to start dropping hints."

Those too young to remember Watergate in its details may struggle to pin down some of the characters and plot twists. But readers who read the long-ago newspaper stories will be entertained by the novel's theories on why Larry O'Brien of the Democratic National Committee was chosen as a target — and precisely what the burglars were seeking.

As a bonus, readers will get a surprise from Mallon's chapter on how — and why — those 18½ minutes of Oval Office tapes came to be erased.

Although "Watergate" isn't genuine history, it makes for genuinely fascinating fiction.

Harry Levins of Manchester retired in 2007 as senior writer of the Post-Dispatch.

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'Watergate'

A novel by Thomas Mallon

Published by Pantheon, 429 pages, $27.95

On sale Tuesday