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Book Review, Ellen Feldman, McCarthy, Novels about America, The Cold War, The Kennedys, The Unwitting
Politics, like love, can be a dirty game
Ellen Feldman’s tautly written, reflective book set in post-war America is a splendid, page-turning book, exploring the territory of the Cold War, rife with darkness and suspicion from both sides of the ideological divide, as seen through the prism of one marriage.
Nell and Charlie Benjamin, at the start of this novel, set on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, are a couple who have it all. She is a journalist, he is the publisher of a respected liberal left leaning magazine. Both of them have secrets. Some of these are in the field of their personal relationship, some of them are where individual and state connect, particularly at a time when there were real battles for hearts and minds going on between ideologies which were carving up the world.
Both America and Russia at that time were claiming some sort of higher moral ground; both had far less moral ways of seeking to exert control.
Feldman expertly weaves her way through a period in American history from 1948 to 1971, exploring attitudes to race, sexual politics, and lifting the lid on the difference the myth and the reality between public face and behind closed doors.
Singer Moses LaMarr singing spirituals to children in Gorky Park, Leningrad, Russia in December 1955 – American Theatre Troupe Production of Porgy and Bess, tour to Moscow and Leningrad,
Just when the central character, Nell, has a handle on ‘what is right’…she gets presented with nuance and ambiguity again and again.
This is a pacy, fascinating read, heroes have feet of clay, the corrupt have surprising integrity. The reader, like the central character, is forced to interpret and reinterpret a life and events, backwards. What happens now, what we know now, may force us to reinterpret what we thought we knew then.
This is a book full of absolutely believable twists and turns. Nell and Charlie are fictional, but the stage on which Feldman sets them, and the manipulations that went on to control that stage, were not
I was past the point in life when I believed people were of a piece. I had learned to live with ambiguity. If you can’t you have no business falling in love
The title of the book refers to unwitting, because unknowing, collusion in what goes on; however, the unwitting might have asked the questions which were staring them in the face. Sometimes innocence looks like an unwillingness to face the unpalatable
This is in some ways, a difficult book to review, because to explain much of the ‘about’ is to spoil the reader’s own journey.
I recommend this very highly, and will read more of Feldman’s work
The book reminded me, in some ways, of Sebastian Faulks’ similar time-set On Green Dolphin Street
, but also, a more recent, factual read, the excellent A Spy Among Friends, Ben MacIntyre’s account of post-war politics amidst the cold war, and how Britain, America and Russia accommodated themselves, losing and gaining power and ideological empire
I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK
The Unwitting Amazon UK
The Unwitting Amazon USA
Sounds intriguing. I still have A Spy Among Friends on the TBR, thanks to you. You seem to be very steeped in the Cold War at the moment…
I have that long ago review of the Faulks one mentioned waiting to be posted, but its been in that state for 3 months as newer reads get posted before the back catalogue raids happen. I think I’m just fascinated by the double life kind of thing, where that has come from ideological reasons rather than reasons of purely personal gain.
I have a friend who’s working on a novel set during the McCarthy era witchhunt. He’s a retired businessman who had quite a few dealings with Russian corporations. At Squaw last year, he told us how he was in a meeting in Moscow and stepped out of the room to get a coffee. When he returned, one of the other men (a Russian) in the room was digging through his briefcase. From then on, he kept his briefcase within sight and between his knees during meetings. Crazy, eh? I think I’ll recommend this book to him. Thanks!
What’s Squaw Jilanne, is it the (one of the?) writer’s workshop/conferences you go to?
I’m fascinated by books set in that period where there was such a clear divide between left and right, and it was possible to find both intelligent thoughtful idealistic people on both sides AND paranoid, repressive, totalitarian, inhumane people on both sides.
I have to come clean and state it’s taken me a long time to realise that neither left nor right of themselves automatically occupy the ultimate moral high-ground nor the beyond the paleness of awful corrupt, protectionist, self-servingness Though neither can I deny the fact that i think politics which have as a foundation those ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity – or let us say humanity as sisters should be within the mix – are more likely to stay high, provided they don’t begin to exclude some sections from that liberty, equality (of opportunity) and ‘humanity’ And, of course it goes or should go, even wider than that, because its obvious that ‘human’ cannot separate itself from the planet on which it lives, and the other living creatures it shares its space with.
You can tell, your wolves of yesterday are still making me quiver and shiver with awe and delight.
Anyway – I do like your neat way of keeping your own TBR clean – just recommend a book to someone else!
Yes, it’s the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop.
You are so correct in your analysis and conclusion about humanity that I’m sure it was inspired by those wolves.
Now that you’ve discovered my secret method for keeping my TBR pile manageable, I hope you won’t double or triple your rate of recommendations.
Its just a problem that fortunately I’ve recently had a slew of wonderful books, and as its ONLY the ones that are wonderful in my eyes that make it on to here, O’m pretty well always going to be enthusing. Won’t make more than 3 posts a week, so there won’t be more reccs, and if I have a run of sad turkeys, there won’t be any. Though then I trawl through the back catalogue of reviews, there are still some there, as I posted my first Amazon review back in 2001, though i think it was 4 or 5 years before I hit my stride and began to review fairly regularly, and then unstoppably!
I hadn’t heard of this book before seeing your review. sounds a good one
Yes, I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t had more ‘buzzed’ about it, i think it deserves to be read!