The Liberty Campaign - Softcover

Dee, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671890859 ISBN 13: 9780671890858

Publisher: Gallery Books, 1995

Synopsis

Combining finely tuned suspense with provocative insights into the nature of good and evil, The Liberty Campaign is a novel of stunning psychological depth and power.

Gene Trowbridge, a sixty-five-year-old successful advertising executive, fills the days before his retirement assessing his past and considering the future. A deliberate and thoughtful man, Gene lives a solid, peaceful existence with his wife in a genteel Long Island suburb, watching on television the failure of his son Jack's professional baseball career and increasingly aware of his own displacement in a field dominated by the very young. But a chance meeting with Albert Ferdinand, a reclusive neighbor who wins his regard and friendship, upsets the tenuous balance of Gene's world. From the scandal that comes to surround Ferdinand, Gene is brought face to face with the unimaginable depths of cruelty that lie well beyond his complacent suburban community. Spurred on by a persistent journalist and overwhelmed by self-doubt stemming from his instinctive liking and acceptance of a man of potentially indescribable evil, Gene is drawn into a suspenseful search for the truth about Ferdinand's past. In The Liberty Campaign, critically acclaimed author Jonathan Dee has created one of the wisest and most memorable voices in recent fiction. When Gene is ultimately presented with a stark ethical choice and forced to reevaluate his judgment and his principles, Dee captures, with extraordinary precision and power, the vulnerable time in the life of an aging man when he falters, not sure that his own life experience has provided him with the ability to act. The Liberty Campaign is a riveting, multilayered portrait of an ordinary man whose moral universe is tested by a situation that defies the parameters of his decidedly American upbringing and sensibility.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Dee is the author of six novels. He is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a frequent contributor to Harper's, and a former senior editor of The Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School.

From Kirkus Reviews

American Innocence revisited: a retiring adman's spiritual stock-taking acquires dramatic urgency when he learns that his suburban neighbor may be a war criminal. Gene Trowbridge is an advertising executive with a home on Long Island. The 64-year-old Gene is readying himself for retirement and adjustments in his long, loving marriage to wife Ellie when a reporter buttonholes him, asking questions about his reclusive neighbor Albert Ferdinand. His curiosity piqued, Gene befriends Ferdinand; pressed hard, Ferdinand concedes that he's the former Brazilian Army captain who (as the newspaper alleges) oversaw the torture of civilians in the 1960's. But Ferdinand insists that whatever wrong he did in the war against Communism is a private matter ``between me and my God''; his task now is preparing for death and (hopefully) divine acceptance. All this is taxing for Gene, a decent but ``morally undeveloped'' man without a compass in this world of men who torture, and die, for their beliefs. As the authorities and human-rights activists close in, Ferdinand appeals to his friend for help--but Gene finds himself paralyzed, unable to act. Gene works in a business where ``our allegiances are always for sale''; he lives in the reflected glory of a son who is a major-league baseball player; and the story begins on the Fourth of July. While Dee may be pushing Gene's quintessentially American situation too hard, this spellbinding second novel (The Lover of History, 1990) reads like anything but schematic. With a true novelist's flair, the author forestalls our rush to judgment by making the reporter obnoxious and Ferdinand a figure of dignified pathos. Dee's graceful assumption of an older man's voice, his mastery of an elegiac tone, is every bit as impressive as Ishiguro's achievement in The Remains of the Day. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0671890859
• ISBN 13: 9780671890858
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288