New Republic isn’t so new, or good

The just released The New Republic was completed in1998, five years before author Lionel Shriver’s breakthrough, We Have To Talk About Kevin, nine years before her dazzling The Post-birthday World and more than a decade before So Much For That, a novel that takes on the U.S. health-care system and was nominated for the 2010 National Book Award.

Shriver is up front about this new/ old novel, observing in an author’s note that back in 1998 “my sales record was poisonous” and “my American compatriots largely dismissed terrorism as Foreigners’ Boring Problem.”

Now she is a literary star, terrorism is front and centre, and sufficient time has passed since 9/11 to make a satirical novel about blowing up national monuments (and sometimes people) a plausible literary undertaking. The impulse to dust off this old manuscript must have been irresistible.

The story: Edgar Kellogg, once a morbidly obese youngster, now a self-sabotaging 37-year-old, has left corporate law in favour of journal- ism — because Toby Falconer, the kid in high school that everyone admired, is a journalist. Edgar, 20 years on, remains in his thrall.

It is largely on Toby’s recommendation that Edgar is sent by the National Record, an “oppressively earnest tiny-print newspaper,” to cover the activities of the Soldados Ousados de Barba (yes, the SOBS), a terrorist group that has taken responsibility for worldwide mayhem in its bid to win independence for Barba, “a worthless jut of Portugal,” and its political counterpart, O Crème de Barbear. It seems that the larger-than-life Barrington Saddler, the Record’s former man in Barba, has disappeared. Edgar’s job is to look for him while monitoring the activities of the SOB, which has been unaccountably quiet of late.

Once in Barba, Edgar becomes a member of the media contingent that gathers at The Barking Rat. (Canadian content alert: Conrad Black’s stirring denunciation of journalists as “ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest and inadequately supervised” is Shriver’s epigraph for the book and it certainly informs the depiction of Edgar’s new friends.) Alas, they are an unhappy lot. Barrington was the life of the party, the ebullient animator of what fun could be had on Barba. Without him it’s a sad place indeed. For Edgar too: Saddler is his new Falconer, the golden boy to whom he is destined to play second fiddle. And he does for a time. Until he discovers he needn’t. An inevitable problem in publishing this formerly unpublishable book is that Shriver is a better novelist than she was 14 years ago. Mind, her hallmarks are evident: the writing is funny, clever and assured; moreover, she has chosen a hugely difficult topic that presents serious literary challenges. And, as usual, she has more or less pulled it off. Yet it feels dated (do we want to read about a fictional Portuguese terrorist group?), the central character is a jerk and the book is flabby (if it had lost150 pages it might have worked as a novella). In short, it doesn’t sustain itself. I — like the members of the Barba press contingent — found myself wishing Barrington Saddler would show up and liven things up. smurdoch@thestar.ca