I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The narrator, Karen Hollander, is smart, self-aware, tough and funny. She tells the story as a dean of law looking back on a spectacularly successful career, with flashbacks to herself as a child and as a college student. She's decided to write a memoir. She is already an established author and public figure, so she can be confident that it will be published and get noticed. What makes it dicey is that she plans to reveal something illegal and dangerous that she did as a young woman, during the peak of the protest in the '60s.
The cover of True Believers cleverly illustrates the basic conflict that is at the heart of this novel. A young Harvard student in 1968 is involved in a radical plot that, many years later, she decides to reveal in a memoir. It is about the pitfalls of holding too tight to moral convictions and about the toll of living with a lie. returnreturnKaren Hollander spent her privileged youth on Chicago's North Shore with two friends who share an obsession with James Bond. They act out elaborate secret agent adventures which, as they approach college in the 1960s, take a back seat to political activism. It turns out that their pseud-007 adventures were a good rehearsal for the action they ultimately decide to take, caught up in a combination of adolescent self-assurance and facing a horrible war that was taking a hideous toll. Decades later, as Karen works on her memoirs, …
The cover of True Believers cleverly illustrates the basic conflict that is at the heart of this novel. A young Harvard student in 1968 is involved in a radical plot that, many years later, she decides to reveal in a memoir. It is about the pitfalls of holding too tight to moral convictions and about the toll of living with a lie. returnreturnKaren Hollander spent her privileged youth on Chicago's North Shore with two friends who share an obsession with James Bond. They act out elaborate secret agent adventures which, as they approach college in the 1960s, take a back seat to political activism. It turns out that their pseud-007 adventures were a good rehearsal for the action they ultimately decide to take, caught up in a combination of adolescent self-assurance and facing a horrible war that was taking a hideous toll. Decades later, as Karen works on her memoirs, having recently removed herself from a shortlist for a Supreme Court nomination, she sees her granddaughter experiencing many of the same emotions: outrage, a desire to change the world, and a combination of confidence and immaturity that makes her prone to see issues in stark contrast, missing the ambiguities and moral complexities. returnreturnAndersen does a good job of stringing us along about Karen's secret without seeming too manipulative; though I did want to page ahead to find out what it was that Karen had kept secret all these years, it kept me interested enough that I resisted. I never felt his first person narrative was a woman's voice written by a man - it was just Karen Hollander, and her mature reflection on what made children who had every advantage decide that they have to take violent action provides an interesting perspective on a very violent time. (Riots, assassinations, daily confrontations between students and police, a war in which up to two million people died, cultural shifts that were swift and profoundly unsettling, a sense of possibility that was both wonderful and terrifying, depending on where those possibilities might lead ... I should add, these are my own memories evoked by reading this book; unlike other reviewers, I didn't find the author's treatment of this context overdone at all.) returnreturnBut mostly it's a reflection on the way that adolescent self-fashioning is a heady part of becoming a member of society. Don't look here for a big-picture portrait of the time, but rather for an intimate story about one woman and her two childhood friends and the choices they made. And how much our society encourages "true believers" to form around passions. "Which is why," Karen remarks "I've been allergic ever since to groups of people with single-minded visionary passion and without any doubt that they possess the one truth - why, ever since, I've seen cults everywhere I look, not just literal cults, like Scientology, but the astoundingly successful ones around Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey, linus Torvalds and Steve Jobs, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama ... On the spectrum of self-righteous madness, we were somewhere between the lunatic Islamists and the lunatic American right-wingers." returnreturnIf I have one complaint, it's that at 438 pages, there were times when it felt an editorial slimming workout would have given the story more muscle and strength. I muttered at one point "all right, Karen, I get it, you don't have to explain it anymore." But maybe characters who are deans of law schools find it easier to tell than show. It never made me put the book down, even though I have a tempting pile of books begging to be read. returnreturnA couple of quotes recur in the story that evoke some of its mood. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" - from a Wordsworth poem about the French Revolution that plays in the back of 17-year-old Karen's mind, experiencing the thrill of being young and impassioned - and a lyric from the Inktones: "I don't want to set the world on fire / I just want to start a flame in your heart," one that loops as Karen thinks about how her love for one of the trio and her desire to impress him influenced her choices. There's another fine and appropriate quote on the last page, but I will leave it to the reader to encounter it unspoiled. returnreturnBy the way, I got this books from the Early Reviewer program. Thank you, LT. I really enjoyed it.
