The narrative slips back and forth between Karen’s reflections on contemporary life in the early 21st century and tales of her youthful fervor in the late ’60s. She and her two best friends were avid fans of Ian Fleming’s spy novels, and the funniest scenes involve their preteen shenanigans in Wilmette, Ill. Inspired by “Goldfinger,” one of her comrades carries a garrote with Lincoln Logs tied at both ends. A la “Doctor No,” Karen slips tetrodotoxin from the Japanese pufferfish into a diner’s cherry Coke. (Fortunately, the white powder was really just Sweet’N Low, but it’s the thought that counts.)
By the time Karen and her geeky buddies go off to Radcliffe and Harvard, she thinks they’re all done with playacting James Bond, but looking back, she’s not so sure. Perhaps they just moved on to different roles: certified left-wing warriors, “real hepcats [who] smoke reefers. . . . On the spectrum of self-righteous madness, we were somewhere between the lunatic Islamists and the lunatic American right-wingers.”
(Random House) - ‘True Believers’ by Kurt Andersen (Random House. 431 pp. $27).
There’s an endearing if maddening mania about Andersen: He’s the guy playing Twister who wants to touch every spot: past, present and future. (Like Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story,” “True Believers” is set just ahead of where we are now, in a world only a little crazier than this month.) One epigraph won’t do; we get three, from Wordsworth, Twain and Mick Jagger. Andersen’s narrator has never had an unexpressed thought, and although most of those thoughts are entertaining, a tougher editor would have cut back on the banal ones, such as: “Our proliferating electronic media are free to focus on the irrelevant, obliged to fill air time and keep viewers and listeners riled by any means necessary.” Or this: “Smartphones turn grown-ups into faux-teenagers, annoyingly oblivious, shamelessly self-absorbed.” Such lines sound like stale truisms from some once-clever op-ed columnist on a slow news day.
What’s best about “True Believers,” though, is its smart and rambling reflections on how the left has evolved in the 21st century. Must all that angry idealism diminish like bone density, or is it possible to emerge from those protest years without being hopeless or cynical? Chatting with her vegan granddaughter about the glory days, Karen wants to believe in the power of radical action even while acknowledging the inherent danger of true believers. She claims the tragedies of that era “cleansed my system of romanticism,” but fortunately that’s not entirely true. She hasn’t lost those old ideals; they’re just complicated by a lifetime of survival and success. Plenty of us muddling along in the same compromised position will enjoy watching Karen “reassembling the skeleton in [her] closet, then putting it on display.” If you’re of a certain age, this could be the most rambunctious meeting your book club has for a long time.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter: @RonCharles.
On July 18, Kurt Andersen will be at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.
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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