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The New Republic (2012)

by Lionel Shriver(Favorite Author)

2.92 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0062103326 (ISBN13: 9780062103321)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Harper

review 1: I tried for ages to finish this book. But every time I put it down that's where it would stay. I'm a big Shriver fan and have most of her books. This one however is likely to remain unfinished. Whilst it's not necessary for me to empathise with the characters in a book in order to enjoy it, (after all I liked Game Control and they were loathsome) I failed to engage in any way with the ones in A New Republic. I guess just not caring was it's death knell.
review 2: This is one of Lionel Shriver's early novels, written back in the 90s when nobody was paying much attention to her. The tone is that of a good magazine article, with scenes and dialogue and some cogent but not striking analysis of the main character's inner workings. Edgar Kellog is a formerly fat ex-... morelawyer who gets himself assigned as a stringer for a news magazine to the fictional Iberian republlic of Barba, which is beset by a rabidlly anti-immigrant terrorist group, one that has committed heinous acts offshore, while leaving the homeland untouched. Shriver is an issues novelist, and the issue here isn't so much terrorism as the human ego and why dastardly bastards have so much charm and charisma. Edgar isn't one. He, like the author who created him, is a striver. He travels to Barba as the stringer for a news magazine to find out what happened to Barrington Saddler, the kind of guy he always wanted to be -- someone who lights up the room by just walking into it, someone who can, seemingly, get away with anything. This is actually an intersting dilemma, but Shriver fails to give us an interesting answer, for one thing because we, as readers, don't give a damn about Edgar Kellog either. He's snarky, aggressive, and shallow, and he seems quite frankly blown away by the fact that this doesn't make him popular. Much of the book takes place in the form of endless, circular conversations with a little travel writing in between. The lack of development, the lack of depth, results in a novel ultimately as lacking in charisma as its main character. less

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