A Thread of Years

Traces the decline of Anglo-American civilization and the concept of the gentleman in a fictionalized social history that follows a man named Kensington and the people who surround him from 1901 to 1969, and discusses the reasons why the author chose to write about each episode

The prolific Lukacs, author or editor of 18 previous books (including The Hitler of History), has written something so original in form that describing it is difficult. Starting with the year 1901 and ending with the year 1969, Lukacs presents vignettes, one per year, that could be labeled historical fiction. Although real-life people show up in the vignettes, the protagonists are characters created by Lukacs. The purpose of the loosely connected sketches is to portray the history of manners in 20th-century America and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. The theme behind the exercise is the decline of Western civilization as the ideal of the gentleman is dismissed as anachronistic. These annual scenes would be daring as is, but Lukacs takes his unusual form a step further into the experimental realm by following each with a dialogue. Participants in the dialogue are the author and an unnamed second person who challenges Lukacs's substance and style. Lukacs, a well-known maverick within the discipline of history, is self-conscious in his choice of format. As he puts it, he has chosen to move away from attributing thoughts, words and deeds to persons deemed great by historians. Instead, he has chosen to write about individuals (who are sometimes representative of types) "whose plausibility exists only because of the historical reality about their places and times." The book is filled with interesting contradictions, including Lukacs's claim to avant-garde status while simultaneously casting doubt on the avant-garde. Whatever readers conclude about Lukacs's experiment, one quality is undeniably refreshing?his emphasis on the history of common individuals rather than presidents, kings or the nameless masses.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a series of 69 brief ``vignettes,'' which portray events in the life and milieu of a fictitious individual from Philadelphia, prolific historian Lukacs (The Hitler of History, 1997, etc.) seeks to portray the decline of the once-regnant Anglo-American civilization and ``the ideal of the gentleman.'' The author's intended effect is to evoke interest in real historical problems and issues. The actual effect, however, is rather wearisomeespecially since the author insists on giving the reader, at the conclusion of each vignette, an imaginary dialogue between himself and a friend discussing the historic importance of the sketch just concluded. The story Lukacs tells, covering the years from 1901 through 1969, is a familiar one: He sketches the gradual absorption of the influential Anglo-Saxon minority into an increasingly polyglot, multicultural, and turbulent America; the gradual decline of self-confidence of the old Anglo-American culture; and its replacement with a society more egalitarian but more materialist and relativist, and less deferential and ordered. Lukacs explains that this hybrid work has no plot, but rather is a ``thread'' within the larger ``ribbon'' of American culture: a ``ribbon'' he describes in an afterword as a skein of reactive events commencing with the conclusion of WW II and resulting in decadence and decline by the end of the 1960s. Lukacs appears to view the ``American Century'' as a long descent into barbarism, and he ends, cryptically, with the year 1969, by which time, he argues, ``the great cities of America were shivering and deteriorating and when the urban and urbane bourgeois period of American history had come to its end.'' He ends by arguing that the ideal of Anglo-American civilization ``lived on in the gardens of America and in the minds of ever more scattered, but perhaps still numerous, men and women.'' Lukacs has given us some exotic ruminations that are not quite history, not quite fiction, together with many debatable observations, amounting in all to an often tedious literary exercise. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Lukacs caps a long, distinguished career as a historian of the twentieth century with a sui generis work of historical demonstration and analysis: 67 vignettes, sequentially entitled "1901" through "1969" ("1931" and "1954" are see references to "1957" and "1961," respectively), each succeeded by a dialogue between Lukacs and his argumentative alter ego. The persons in them are, with very few exceptions, fictive but characteristically the kinds of person Lukacs knows best: displaced middle Europeans (Lukacs is originally Hungarian), upper-middle-class English, and well-heeled Philadelphians. What they have in common is Western bourgeois civilization--good manners, discretion, liberality, high behavioral standards, religious orthodoxy, and the other traits of the gentleman--and that civilization is what, through the gradual loss of such people, the twentieth century has by now, 30 years after Lukacs' recapitulation ends, quite lost. That loss is Lukacs' main theme, but his ability to conjure very specific persons and particular settings utterly prevents him from becoming pedantic or moralistic and gives readers a pleasure in the rendering of social textures that few, if any, contemporary American fiction writers provide. Lukacs keeps saying he is no novelist, but he is as repeatably readable and as ponderable as the finest novelists. Ray Olson

This book will make library cataloguers tear their hair. Lukacs (The Hitler of History, LJ 9/1/97) writes vignettes that he has made up, covering the years 1901-69. The short chapters, each covering a different year, are divided into two sections. The first describes a particular place and a particular people (made up by the author). This is followed by a dialog of the author with himself concerning the chapter. At three locations within the book is "The Ribbon," intended to tie everything together. The author's basic theme is the "decline of a particular civilization." Lukacs's lucid writing and reasoning allow the reader, once past the strange arrangement, to grasp the theme. This unusual intellectual history is recommended only for very large academic libraries.?Dennis L. Noble, North Olympic Lib. System, Port Angeles, Wash.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.