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[title]By Lionel Shriver. Harper, $27.
When Lionel Shriver wrote The New Republic in 1998, her lack of previous commercial success made it impossible to find a U.S. publisher. By the time We Need to Talk About Kevin and others had made her a best-selling author, the 9/11 attacks had rendered Shriver’s terror-themed satire a commercially untenable commodity. Finally, this spring, the honed work of caustic geopolitical commentary sees the light of day.
Edgar Kellogg, a litigator at a powerful New York law firm in his late thirties, sets out on a quixotic quest when he quits law to pursue journalism. Decamped by a national newspaper to a fictional but all-too-believable Portuguese backwater on the Iberian Peninsula, he finds himself steeped in a toxic miasma for which he is decidedly ill-prepared. As a fledgling separatist movement commits terrorist acts in hopes of advancing its xenophobic agenda, Kellogg tries to discover the fate of his predecessor on the beat—a legendary reporter who has disappeared without explanation.
The events that follow are funny, sad and shocking, as Shriver gradually reveals how a minor-league insurgency can use the media to usurp the world stage and metastasize into a force of mass destruction. She has an uncanny knack for getting into the heads of the incestuous group of Western journalists Kellogg falls in with, who can barely comprehend any ambition after their next big scoop. The novel’s 14-year delay only serves to underscore the grave truths behind its jovial misanthropy. Had it been published in 1998, it would have felt provocative and visionary; in 2012, after we’ve watched a band of extremist outliers create the context for the longest war in American history, its resonances are deeper and more disquieting.
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