If you were too square to enjoy the ’60s or too stoned to remember them, Kurt Andersen has published a big, swinging novel you’ll want to check out. Here in the promiscuous pages of “True Believers” is what it felt like to scream at LBJ and throw M-80s at the ROTC building and harass the Dow Chemical rep. It doesn’t matter that Andersen is a few years younger than these hip characters. He brings the same archival enthusiasm to the Age of Aquarius that he brought to 1848 in his previous novel, “Heyday.” The result is a rambling, colorful story full of witty and pretentious insights, as lovable and self-indulgent as the flower children deserve.
“True Believers” is all about coming clean and revealing the past — a theme Andersen announces so loudly that it would blow the speakers at Woodstock. “Instead of chickening out, allowing the shock and scandal to bloom posthumously,” says our rabidly confessional narrator, “I decided I want to be alive when the truth comes out.” She’s a 64-year-old public intellectual named Karen Hollaender, who runs a prestigious law school, writes bestsellers and pops up on TV as “one of the most accomplished leaders and thinkers of our times.” Everyone thinks they know everything about her — she was on the shortlist to fill a spot on the Supreme Court — but she has been clutching one shocking secret for decades: “I once set out to commit a spectacular murder,” she says in the second paragraph, “and people died.” And more will die if she publishes her memoir!
(Random House) - ‘True Believers’ by Kurt Andersen (Random House. 431 pp. $27).
When does a hook become a tease? Hard to say exactly, but maybe it’s the 30th time that Karen — the hell-bent truth-teller — says she’s going to hold nothing back while holding back on us yet again. Or perhaps it’s on Page 247, when we’re still in the dark and a secret agent asks Karen, “Why did this whole thing get erased and deep-sixed as thoroughly as anything I’ve ever seen in thirty years in this racket?” As she keeps digging to recall the details of what she and her classmates did so long ago, old frenemies threaten to silence her by any means necessary. Explosions — real and figurative — detonate. But the more Andersen delays the Big Revelation, the greater grows our demand for something truly earth-shattering. I began to assume Karen had launched the Tet Offensive. . . .
Cool out. Even if the endlessly postponed shocking news is a cheap trick, there’s plenty to keep us entertained as Karen details her story of “1960s berserkery and lost innocence.” She’s not a particularly believable female character, but she’s an omnivorous cultural critic, not unlike, say, her creator, the charming host of “Studio 360.” She has “saved every diary and journal, every letter . . . catechism work sheets, term papers, restaurant receipts, train schedules, ticket stubs, snapshots, Playbills.” Working through what she calls “the Karen Hollaender Museum and Archive” becomes a merry tour of 1960s America, from Bic pens to Silly Putty, TouchTone phones and supersonic jets. It’s a conflicted act of historical reclamation that diligently checks off every popular icon of the era — every famous march, assassination and concert — even while Karen complains that “nowadays our authentic memories . . . have been squeezed into a second-rate mental ghetto, supplanted by the canon of slick universal media memories.”
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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