A sometimes-starry-eyed but well-observed and entertaining saga of democracy in action.
A ragtag band of extremely wealthy, well-connected reformers upends the two-party system in this debut savvy political novel.
Alex “Atlas” Stein hosts a confab of friends at his Aspen, Colorado, chalet to unveil his plan to start a third party. Specifically, he wants to take on what he sees as the divisiveness, sleaze, and gridlock of American politics. After a lengthy tutorial on the formidable barriers to third parties in a presidential system, he signs up his guests: U.S. Army Gen. Samuel Huntington “Hunt” Smith, who will command the party machinery; policy wonk Julie Kersten-Covington, Atlas’ old flame; internet whiz Lauren Chevez de la Rosa; campaign strategist Mark Stone; and baseball hall-of-famer Tom Robinson, who will serve as the party’s goodwill ambassador. Dubbing itself the “E Party”—with the “E” standing for education, economy, and ethics—the enterprise starts slowly by fielding several candidates for the Illinois state legislature. Thanks to an adroit stealth campaign; a good slate of candidates, dominated by respected teachers; and Atlas’ millions, they win enough seats to deny the Democratic Party a legislative majority and force concessions. They pass breakthrough initiatives via shrewd maneuvering and crowd-pleasing publicity stunts; for example, they break a budget impasse by offering prizes to voters who provide expense-cutting ideas. They’re poised to make huge gains in the next election until a femme fatale, a Machiavellian Democratic operative, the even-more-Machiavellian Democratic speaker of the Illinois House, and the Democratic National Committee chairman target the E Party with tawdry rumors and ginned-up criminal charges. Some readers may find Nemerovski’s view of political passions to be quaintly out of date after the election of Donald Trump, as the E Partiers are sure that it’s issues of good governance, fiscal responsibility, and education that will spark a populist uprising against the political establishment. Fortunately, his portrait of nuts-and-bolts politics is realistic and engrossing. His characters play a ceaseless, multilevel chess game, strategizing on candidate recruitment, messaging, media schmoozing, parliamentary procedures, and the subtle niceties of legislation that can have explosive, unexpected results. Although there are some longueurs of anodyne banter, the narrative largely unfolds at a snappy pace via emails and press reports that follow the characters’ moves and countermoves. The result is a sharp, colorful critique of state politics that takes its importance seriously.
A sometimes-starry-eyed but well-observed and entertaining saga of democracy in action.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68111-135-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Wasteland Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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