Customer Reviews

American Subversive: A Novel

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A bombing, a beautiful terrorist, a mysterious note: these are the sparks that ignite David Goodwillie's second book and first novel, "American Subversive." It's a glib thriller with unexpected gems buried within its well-turned sentences, a book that's quickly devoured but that lingers on the palate.

The novel deals with domestic terrorism, and the book's plot is lent chilling plausibility by the current political climate. After a bombing in Manhattan, gossip blogger Aidan receives an email with a photo of a beautiful woman with the caption, "This is Paige Roderick. She is the one responsible." His curiosity quickly draws him into Paige's world, and together their narratives make up an engrossing story that explores the world of the radical underground and those who inhabit it. The book is meticulously researched and in part based on the actions of the radical group the Weather Underground, which lends the story an eerie realism.

The voices of Aidan and Paige are distinct and well-written. The split narrative is handled deftly and is never confusing, and the prose is engaging, if a bit distant at times - even the sympathetic, fascinating Paige is at times unreachable. That said, Goodwillie has accomplished the balancing act so well that it's impossible to decide which one of them is the protagonist. The author tells the story of those who care too much and those who don't care at all, but doesn't average the two into a happy and potentially meaningless ending. These characters may be fictions, but they are no caricatured martyrs. This is the beauty of the book: we are shown both extremes, apathy and fanaticism, but we are never told which is right, nor are we thrown into a rhetorical firefight. This is a story about people, not politics.

American Subversive is a novel of harmonious contradictions, a rare creature that, while undeniably the product of its times, serves as warning about a possible political future that may be closer than we realize. Goodwillie is an astute observer, and in Paige and Aidan articulates the ache and apathy so many of us feel but cannot identify - and tells a damn good story at the same time.

As you might expect from a political thriller, American Subversive is fast paced, gripping and a serious page turner. Now, I'm not a thriller kind of girl but this book is un-freaking-believable. Seriously. The concept is so timely (blogging and terrorism) and I actually found it easy to relate to the main characters (Goodwillie writes from the perspective of a woman - how cool is that?).

The relationship between said characters (two narrators: blogger and terrorist) is complicated but innocent, with intertwining facets you find yourself constantly thinking about long after the final page.

Aidan, failed journalism student turned gossip blogger on a site that eerily resembles Gawker, is both completely unlikeable (but with good intentions) and the kind of protagonist you root for from beginning to end. Paige, a very sad but very determined eco-terrorist is responsible for turning 2010 Manhattan into chaos. It's horribly familiar to those of us who lived through 9/11, which makes it a relevant and necessary read.

American Subversive is a book about belief turned inside-out. It's an intelligent and literary thriller, a thought-provoking peek into America's dark soul, and a veritable page turner. It's also the debut book for David Goodwillie, an author who is up to the task of unearthing the country's seductive roots.

The dual protagonists/narrators are Aidan Cole, a member of the chattering class, who blogs for Roorback, ("a roorback is a defamatory falsehood published for political effect") and Paige Roderick, an attractive idealist who is involved in an act of domestic terrorism at the midtown Manhattan location of Barney's. One late night, at a glitterati party following this act, Aidan checks his email to view an image of a woman crossing Madison Avenue (the site of the bombing) with the words, "This is Paige Roderick. She's the one responsible."

But Goodwillie is too good to settle for a "who-done-it" thriller. He delves deeply into his characters to reveal two alienated and unmoored thirty-somethings who are dealing with a profound disillusionment based on divorce, death, a country that lost its way, and friendships that easily turn into betrayals.

Paige turns to domestic radicalism after the wasteful death of her brother Bobby in Iraq. She says,"Do you really want to know my worldview? Because it's pretty bleak these days. Everything I once saw as a problem with others -- the numbness, the detachment, the disillusionment that came with being American -- everything I once sought to fix...I'm coming now to feel myself." And Aidan? His transformation is less organic. He reflects, "A decade had passed in the back of countless cabs, at fancy dinners and midnight pizzerias; the drug dipping and surprisingly functional alcoholism that consumed our days and destroyed our mornings; nothing stimulating nothing surprising, our thirties spread out before us like our twenties, but with lessons unlearned."

There is a sadness in these characters, a lack of connection that makes them ripe for subversion. Aidan's emptiness and ennui primes him for a connection with Paige, who is intense and filled with purpose -- everything he is not, although interestingly, they are more intriguing characters alone and not together. Neither fall into stock stereotypes; rather, they are two-dimensional with distinct voices and a great deal of vulnerability. Only in the last 50 or so pages does the authorial voice intercede, momentarily reminding the reader that Goodwillie is creating these characters and pulling the strings.

I read this book right after NYC dodged a bullet with a Times Square car bombing, and gasped at how unwittingly prophetic this book really is. It's a spot-on view of not only domestic terrorism, but a jaded Manhattan at the bulls-eye of today's digital age. (4.5)

This is one of the books on the New York Times 2010 list, for good reason. It was a fascinating read. This novel focuses on two people: Paige and Aidan. Aidan is a 30 something blogger who becomes fascinated with Paige after the bombing of a local agency in post 9/11 New York City. Paige is a 29 year old woman with a history of working for non profit organizations that exist to lobby for the benefit of noble causes. She becomes radicalized after her brother's death as a soldier in Iraq and becomes instrumental in organizing bombings of targets. Paige and Aidan eventually meet and become friends of necessity. Goodwillie's wordy novel details the relationship between the two.

I loved this book - it was ambitious and sometimes fell a little flat but the overwhelming majority of the novel was absolutely wonderful. It's wordiness was something that you could sink your teeth into and the story and writing style were such that it was engrossing - so engrossing that I couldn't put it down. The novel was also really funny in some parts. For instance, Aidan heads to suburbia where he visits with aging hippies and the way that they are portrayed made me giggle. The novel was also tender and achingly endearing in some ways - it's quickly apparent that Aidan has fallen in love with Paige and how Goodwillie describes their affair is very touching.

This is a wonderful read, well worth the time and the money to add it to your library.

I picked this up on the strength of the author's memoir of young adulthood in New York City. Like a painting can do more justice to a place than a photo, his use of a novel format brings the city and its people more to life than the previous book. I was taken with the skill in which the story was presented, and quality of the writing. Some reader tags suggested on Amazon were "thriller" or "crime fiction". These are true in a certain sense, but do not to me do justice to the fullness of the work. I was a little skeptical of the premise initially, but was quickly taken in. Overall, a very good story told with great skill.

Review:

American Subversive by David Goodwillie

With his first novel, American Subversive, author David Goodwillie has done what any future major league baseball player dreams of... he has knocked it out of the park his first time at bat.

Instantly captivating, this book progresses in a unique format as it is told through alternating first person narratives of the two protagonists: Aidan Cole and Paige Roderick. Each chapter relates the characters' relative perspectives on the events leading to their first meeting. The intrigue builds as their mutual attraction leads to their subsequent involvement in a New York City bombing. The attack is terrorism and it is home grown.

Aidan, a writer in New York City and journalism school dropout, is under-achieving in life and at work while he frequently destroys millions of brain cells attending late night society parties. Paige, an environmentalist educated at UNC and shattered by the death of her brother in Iraq, is disillusioned with the political approach to achieving public awareness of her causes. The path to their first clandestine meeting, and soon to be entangled lives, begins when Aidan receives an email and embedded picture stating: "This is Paige Roderick. She's the one responsible."

This book hits you with all of the suspense, pace and page turning drama one would expect from a thriller on any bestseller list. The action moves from bombings of midtown Manhattan buildings to living life underground and on the run. The violent death of one of their protectors, and a betrayal by friends to the authorities, ultimately leads Paige and Aidan to a forced separation.

Throughout the novel, Goodwillie captures the local color of the story's backdrops: New York City, the exclusive Fishers Island, resort areas of Vermont and the mountains of North Carolina. All the while, bombs are constructed, hideouts and false identities are compromised and the plot thickens.

Yet, this novel is much more that a run of the mill thriller. Simply stated, Goodwillie writes in an original style and yet one that is reminiscent of classic literature. His ability to build and integrate scene, dialogue and character is excellent. Throughout the novel he displays a wonderful sense of humor. However, it is his phrasing with metaphoric illuminations and insightful depictions that is so unique. It is also something rarely found on the bookstore tables filled with today's contemporary fiction.

American Subversive is a must read. It is an engrossing novel with a well crafted ending. This book will leave you wading through the many layers of thought provoking issues long after the reading is done. It will also leave you wanting for more from David Goodwillie. He is a rare new talent that has a great deal to say. He says it with a style, and on a level, that very few writers offer. This reader cannot wait for his next publication. Until then, I suggest you read his memoir: Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

Best book I've read this year.
After a terrorist bombing at Barneys, Aidan Cole, a NYC based blogger, who works for a thinly-veiled Nick Denton of Gawker media fame, receives an anonymous email with a photo of a beatiful girl, claiming that the girl, Paige Roderick, is responsible for the attack.
A page-turning, thoughtful, careful study on what patriotism means in post-9/11 America, this is the book I've been waiting for for a long time.

Very poorly defined characters, they contradict themselves in every conversation and so become unbelievable. They are stick figures that recite "pithy" phrases. Not the contradictions that make a character interesting but statements that make no sense. I am weary of the New York hipsters.

Observant and uncomfortable, Goodwillie's incisive commentary into the simultaneous vacancy and seriousness of our times was a quick, yet substantive, read. Goodwillie built depth by detail, rounding out the on-paper opposites, Paige and Aidan. Goodwillie handled serious modern contemplations in a sharp and fast-paced tone, accelerating his reader's curiosity with that of the unfolding plot. I found that the split-perspective worked swimmingly. Gooodwillie provided a honest and insightful meditation on what love means-or doesn't mean-today. Maybe I'm just another idealist looking for that something in a confusing time...

Through a set of circumstances too convoluted to bore you with, I happen to have been asked to make some editorial comments on the manuscript that became Mr. Goodwillie's first book. It was a memoir and while it was well enough written, the big thing that I recommended was that he not waste his talents on a form that, while dominating the best-seller lists at the time, is fundamentally dishonest. I doubt the comments ever made it back to him and his memoir was published to some acclaim, though I was intrigued to discover a USA Today story where his book was contrasted with James Frey's Milion Little Pieces, the thoroughly falsified disaster that helped put an end to the craze. But this second book from Mr. Goodwillie is indeed a novel and a terrific one at that.

In alternating chapters a young blogger in Manhattan, Aidan Cole, and the subversive of the title, Paige Roderick, describe how they drifted together and onto the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. Paige was recruited out of Beltway think-tank politics by an anti-corporate terror cell after her brother was killed in Iraq. As the book opens, she and her comrades have just blown up Barney's headquarters in NYC. When an anonymous informant e-mails Aidan a photograph of Paige leaving the scene he becomes obsessed with finding her.

His determination and the manner in which he becomes ever more involved are very much out of character. After all, as he says at one point, the epigraph of his generation ought to be: "We never believed in anything." Yet he is eventually driven by a belief that he can help Paige and that together they can stop her increasingly radical compatriots. Likewise, Paige only become truly passionate once she turns to stopping the bombings. When she's involved in them she just seems to be going with the flow of others' beliefs:

"If Keith and Lindsay were comfortable with this life. then I would be, too. Questions still plagued me, of course, not because they had no answers, but because they were never posed. It was as if challenging each other, probing beneath the surface of our surreal reality, into ethics, say, and responsibility, had been deemed unnecessary, irrelevant."

Later on it is Aidan who asks the uncomfortable questions, about what the point of the bombing is. And when Paige unthinkingly says its to shock people in the suburbs out of their complacency, he puts the shiv in by asking why the American middle class shouldn't be complacent given how well we live?

The great irony of the book lies in the way the two finally find their purpose only in trying to defend America from the subversives, putting everything in their own lives at risk to do so. One of the characters in the book, a rich Venezuelan friend of Aidan's, offers what really ought to be the epigraph, in a quote from the Italian anarchist Alfredo Bonanno: "Beyond the crises, beyond other problems of underdevelopment, beyond poverty and hunger, the last fight that capital will have to put up, the decisive one, is the fight against boredom." In an interview while he out publicizing this book, Mr. Goodwillie mentioned that he was being criticized for writing it by conservatives who couldn't possibly have read it. He's right about that. His portrayal of two young people who snap out of their nihilistic boredom and take up the fight for "capital," even if they wouldn't see it quite that way, could hardly be a more conservative text.