The New Republic Lp: A Novel [Large Print] [Paperback]

When I read "We Need to Talk About Kevin' several years ago, I couldn't put it down and I couldn't stop talking about it. I passed it along to friends and family, I recommended it to a book club, I wanted everyone to read and experience Shriver's unbelievably moving prose. Her characters and their emotions were truly alive, and I was engaged. When the opportunity for an advance copy of this 'old but new' book, 'The New Republic', I jumped, I couldn't wait to read another riveting Shriver tale. How sad to be so disappointed.

The premise behind the book is an interesting and relevant one: the real nature of journalism, and the power of the media to manipulate a story for its own purposes. Add to the mix a fictional, miserable corner of Portugal and the local terrorist group seeking independence for the people of Barba, and you have the potential for a humorous tale. Edgar Kellogg is our main character, a lawyer-turned-journalist and former fat kid whose inability to connect with other humans has left him floundering in his mid-thirties, still yearning for popularity and the approval of his peers. With a stroke of luck, Edgar lands a job as a stringer for a national paper and is sent to Barba to cover the terrorist activity and the disappearance of a revered journalist - once there, Edgar begins to see that all is not as it appears.

I just couldn't enjoy this book, I don't need to relate to characters, it's ok with me if they're not likable, but these weren't even interesting. I thought the first half of the book could have been cut in half again, which might have helped move along the fairly light plot, and perhaps made the mild twists a little more shocking. As it was, I felt bogged down in the characters' pretentious speak, and unable to engage with the story.

Shriver is a gifted and clever writer, and I look forward to reading something else from her - this just was not the book for me.

The New Republic is in part a satirical riff on journalism and journalists and in other parts, a Black comedy about terrorism. Edgar Kellogg used to be fat but now is thin. He still thinks of himself as fat, however. That knowledge has driven him all his life: he wants to be popular but is convinced ahead of time that he's always going to be second best. In defense, he blows off the people he meets before they get the chance to blow him off. And now, in his mid-thirties and trying to jumpstart his career in journalism, Edgar is sent to the Portuguese province of Barba as a stringer for a third-rate New York newspaper. He replaces a legendary journalist who was beloved by all but seems to have made up stories when he couldn't find enough evidence to write them otherwise.

Barba, situated at the extreme southern tip of Portugal, is ... there's no question ... a hole. Blistering winds blow non-stop across its barren lands. It has no industry, no culture or architecture, precious little in any of the other amenities of life. The province has one native crop, the hairy-pear. It's "something like a kiwi on testosterone." It falls apart in your hands when you try to pick it up and it smells so bad that you want to vomit. The natives make a beer from it but, no surprise, it's close to undrinkable, redeemed only by its high alcohol content.
Barba, of course, doesn't exist, except in the fertile imagination of the author, but in this alternate history, Barba does have one thing that draws the attention of correspondents from across the globe. Its own terrorist group.

"The Daring Soldiers of Barba" --Os Soldados Ousados de Barba (abbreviated as "the SOB")- are unique among independence movements because they have committed atrocities for years but have never committed an act on their own soil. No one has ever met them. They're just a voice on the phone. Reporters flock to Barba, drawn like lemmings by the irresistible lure of violence and fresh blood.

Enter Edgar. What follows is a Keystone Kops kind of story, replete with word and name jokes and flip description. But it works. It's funny. There's the Crème de Barbear, the one indigenous political party. It's headed by an inveterate liar named Tomas Verdade ("Tom Truth"). The reporters congregate at the end of a not very hard day's work at a bar called O Rato que Late, "The Barking Rat." One of the main drags is the Rua de Evaporacao (not hard to translate) and when an SOB leader is finally interviewed -hidden by a screen- his name is O Borbulha, which, as Edgar explains to the novice stringer who has been granted the interview, translates as "The Zit. With a face like that, you'd give interviews behind a sheet, too."

Not all of the humor is this broad. Shriver has a deft touch with comic description. She describes a plate full of hors d'oeuvres -"intricate open-faced sandwiches, individually assembled into one-of-a-kind Miros." When eventually violence breaks out in Barba (rather than, as in the past, elsewhere), the rioters behave "as if playing a civil-disobedience version of kick-the-can," advancing on the poiicemen and retreating, with little real violence committed on either side. When finally the police resort to rubber bullets, "cast in a fleshy pink, the thick, snub-nosed cylinders scattered the square like discarded marital aids."

It's a risky tactic to try to forge satire out of material that can all to easily be taken as sophomoric but Shriver succeeds until quite late in this novel. The concluding pages are less successful though still not bad. The problem is how to end things. The stakes have ratcheted up. Everything is no longer funny in Barba, where the locals have started to take their revolution seriously. Shriver's solution to how to end all this is ingenuous but somehow less satisfying. Still, all in all, this is a commendable novel on a (potentially) difficult topic.

(Among Shriver's previous novels is We Need to Talk About Kevin, which was made into a critically acclaimed movie that premiered this year [2011].)

In a sort of satirical Heart of Darkness, a lawyer turned would-be journalist packs his bags for a (makebelieve) country with a terrorist movement, on the trail of a disappeared journalist whom everyone knows. As he reaches the country, moves into the disappeared man's apartment, integrates himself into his circle of colleagues, and starts covering the terrorist movement, he discovers things about himself and the disappeared journalist. When it all blows up in his face, he comes to terms with: what? That wasn't entirely clear to me.

The plot summary portion of this review is intentionally cryptic because saying anything more would spoil the plot; on the other hand, it's probably obvious to anyone who reads more than two books a month what the plot is going to be. The point of the book seemed to be satirize the behavior of the journalists whose reporting fills the pages of the international news and political media -- and those media themselves -- but satire is supposed to make us think and this satire just makes us scoff. OK, everyone's an idiot, and especially media mavens, but do we need hundreds of pages of that? We don't learn anything from this satire -- I felt dirtied, unedified by it, as opposed to amused or instructed insightfully. In particular the cutesy puns on the names of the terrorist group tire the reader out about thirty pages in. I struggled to finish this, and that I did is probably owing to the fact that the book stuck persistently to the front seat of my car so it presented itself when I was going into restaurants and other activities where I was going to need something to read.