Omniscience with intimacy – that’s what David Goodwillie attempts with a dual first person narrative in American Subversive. Aidan Cole, a thirty-something Manhattan blogger, is gliding through a superficial stream of parties, media echoes, and tangential jet-set encounters, when a bomb goes off on the 15th floor of the Barney’s building in Midtown. Four days later, he crashes a party at the loft of his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Cressida, a dating columnist with a trying-to-be-hip NY Times. There, in the company of Julian Touche’, scion of a wealthy Venezuelan family, he receives an email consisting only of a photo, an alluring young woman walking briskly away from Barney’s, with the caption, “This is Paige Roderick. She’s the one responsible.” She’s also the second narrator.
If Aidan is blase´, wry, ironic, cynical, Paige (in her mid 20s) is intense, sincere, committed. They both are obsessed with their surroundings. He documents them (or at least the media’s portrayal of them) a dozen times a day on his blog, “Roorback” – “Defamatory falsehood published for political effect” – in his hands, an exposure of our irreverent media age. She has a much more elemental, existential view of the world around her. As a fugitive, she needs to know where all the exits are, who might be following her, and where the next threat is coming from.
After college, Paige joined the throngs seeking to change the world through non-profit activism, but got drawn into the outlaw realms of direct action. The Seattle WTO protests and the Earth Liberation Front bombings at Vail ski resort, both during the late ‘90s, serve as Goodwillie’s call to arms. Paige and her two cohorts, Lindsay and Keith, spend months plotting and building each bomb, secure in a centuries-old Vermont farmhouse.
Aidan becomes a reluctant detective, using his connections with Julian and skills learned at the Columbia School of Journalism (he dropped out in his second year), to locate Paige and her cell. Along the way, he drops in at Fisher’s Island, a gated community for the world’s very, very rich; a fading Catskills collection of ‘60s liberals, who applauded but did not participate in the violence of that era; and his divorced father in the Connecticut countryside. Set in a specific place, east of the Hudson in the late ‘00s, Goodwillie knows the scenery very well, and takes his time to convincingly fill in the background. For a child of the ‘60s like myself, the reverberations of and direct allusions to protestors such as the Students for a Democratic Society, and their offshoot, the Weathermen, provide a direct connection to current events.
American Subversive, while exploring that byways of modern America’s media obsessions and excesses of capitalism, uses Aidan’s search and Paige’s evolving attitude towards violence to drive the suspense. Who sent Aidan the email, and its followup? Why is he writing from a life in hiding on the road? Will he decide to expose Paige? What is the larger collective directing Paige’s cell? When the leader of that cell takes things a step too far, will Paige be able to intervene in time? And why was her narrative suddenly stopped in mid-sentence?
This one’s a page-turner, while raising serious questions about America in the early 21st century, how we live and who actually controls things.