Let's hope, for her husband Dick Cheney's sake, that it doesn't reveal what his vice presidency will be like. Mrs. Cheney's fictional vice president, a 59-year-old Republican, dies in office of a heart attack. Her real-life husband is also 59 and has, of course, just survived his fourth heart attack. As one of her characters, a paranoid Secret Service agent, observes, "Life imitates art."

Well, perhaps "art" is too strong a word. "The Body Politic" is a poorly written, allegedly comic, satire about life in a Republican White House, coauthored by Lynne Cheney and Victor Gold, who served as Vice President Spiro Agnew's press secretary and coauthored President George Bush's "autobiography," the out-of-print "Looking Forward."

In 1988, when the novel was originally published, Dick Cheney suffered his third heart attack and underwent quadruple bypass surgery. Twelve years later, the novel reappears and Cheney's heart fails again. If he were a superstitious man, he might think his wife's book is cursed.

There is something else in Mrs. Cheney's book that might give Mr. Cheney pause. When the fictional vice president dies, his scheming, ambitious wife participates in a White House coverup of his death and manages to succeed her late husband as the country's first female vice president. Move over, Lady Macbeth.

Mind you, this is all supposed to be funny. "The Body Politic" is, after all, one of those slapdash works of fiction penned by Washington insiders with too much time on their hands. It would be entirely forgettable except for its uncanny coincidences and remarkable reappearance at the most awkward moments.

The 1988 novel first resurfaced last summer when Dick Cheney, in charge of George W. Bush's hunt for a running mate, became the vice presidential candidate himself. That was after Bush Senior placed that private call to Cheney's doctor in Texas to make sure the old warhorse's damaged heart could withstand the rigors of a presidential campaign.

Governor Bush's selection of his father's former defense secretary suddenly returned Lynne Cheney to the limelight. The world hadn't heard much from Mrs. Cheney since her controversial, outspoken tour of duty as Ronald Reagan's chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Even her role as co-host of one of the lesser Beltway talk shows, the now defunct "CNN Crossfire Sunday," was terminated in 1998. But thanks to her husband's rise, she, too, was resurrected. Her friend and fellow cultural warrior, the virtuous Bill Bennett, commented, "She'll be hard to muzzle."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"