Harry Gold: A Novel - Softcover

Dillon, Millicent

3.92

25 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1585672440 ISBN 13: 9781585672448

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2002

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In casting Gold's story as a novel, Dillon creates a gripping narrative from the true events of political life in America from the thirties through the McCarthy era, from Gold's recruitment to his training in tradecraft to his role in Julius Rosenberg's and Klaus Fuchs's atomic espionage at Los Alamos. The result is a novel with the psychological depth of Graham Greene's The Third Man, the taut pacing of All the President' s Men, and the moral poignancy of Phillip Roth's I Married A Communist.

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About the Author:

Millicent Dillon is the author of You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles, A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles, After Egypt: Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt and three works of fiction, The Dance of the Mothers, The One in the Back is Medea and Baby Perpetua and Other Stories. She also edited The Viking Portable Paul and Jane Bowles. She lives in San Francisco.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Brooding, creepy fictional biography of the Jewish-American chemist who became a courier for the Soviets before and during WWII and was significant in the exposure of Klaus Fuchs and the conviction of the Rosenbergs. The sensational spy stories of the 50s have been deflated by postCold War revelations that information allegedly leaked by Americans accused of serving the Soviets was not all that consequential. After Whittaker Chambers, the most pathetic American to plead guilty to espionage during the Red scare, was introverted Harry Gold, who lived with his brother and Russian-born parents in Philadelphia. Gold, a profoundly uninteresting bachelor whose underwhelming presence deflated Hoover's attempt to cast him as the embodiment of evil, dictated several detailed confessions to the FBI. He testified as a prosecution witness against the Rosenbergs, served half of a 30-year prison sentence, and then worked as a researcher in a hospital, dying at his parents' house in 1972. Gold has none of the glitter that appeals to biographers, but, as fictionalized by Dillon (You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles, 1998, etc.), he becomes a classic le Carr drudge, an intelligent, repressed social failure whose innocent urge to do good and suspicion of anti-Semitic Depression-era America make him an easy mark for Soviet recruiters. In dry, restrained prose, Dillon shows how Gold's hunger for human contact helps him ignore the hypocrisies and manipulations of his handlers. As a courier moving documents and money, he spends long hours on lonely trains, transfixed by the glamour his secret life provides. After building him up as an existential hero worthy of Graham Greene, Dillon piles on the irony, quoting long, patronizing passages from his trial and suggesting Gold's essential tragedy was that no one cared enough to know him. Intense, disturbing fictional portrait of a historical also-ran whose unshakable faith in human goodness, and deeply moving sense of loyalty, made it easy to betray his country.-- Copyright � 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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