An essay in Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales From Great Fiction Writers (Lonely Planet, 2013

Going South

By KURT ANDERSEN

I SUPPOSE IT WAS INEVITABLE. My family’s annual vacations had always consisted of weeks-long summer driving trips, and almost exclusively north, to cool, tidy, familiar Minnesotas and Wisconsins and Manitobas. I had studied Spanish for ten years. I was 17 going on 18, out of high school a semester early, working a minimum-wage job and admitted to the college of my choice. And for three years my favorite book had been The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s iconifying 1968 chronicle of Ken Kesey and his dozen friends’ pointless and profound coast-to-coast-to-coast 1964 trip across America in an old school bus. It was a moment, for people my age, when high adventure seemed not only possible but easy, not only easy but obligatory.

And so in the summer of 1972, five other Omaha boys and I bought a stubby old yellow school bus. It got atrocious mileage, even by the standards of that era, but gas cost only 35 cents a gallon. We ripped out most of the seats, built some crude wooden storage cabinets, installed a cassette tape player and speakers, tacked down 100 square feet of gold loop-pile carpeting, bought some maps, and – cell-phoneless, internetless — lit out for the territory. We were headed south, due south, way south, beyond the frontier, to Mexico.

Two or three days later in Texas, at the end of I-35, we learned that anyone who looked like a hippie was being turned away at the border. Although not exactly hippies, we were a half-dozen teenage boys with longish hair, dressed in t-shirts and jeans and jammed into a funky school bus. (Also, it turned out, we were about to bring coals to Newcastle – that is, mescaline to Mexico. The most hell-bent of my companions, unable to abide throwing away perfectly good hallucinogens, swallowed his entire two-gram stash in Laredo.) At a Woolworth’s in Laredo we bought a tube of Brylcreem, and for $3 apiece the squarest dress shirts we could find. Those of us with mustaches and sideburns shaved. Voilà! De-counterculturalized, looking more like Mormon missionaries or The Partridge Family‘s nerd cousins than Merry Pranksters or Easy Rider dudes, we were waved right across by two sets of border guards, out of America and into Mexico.

My recollection of most of the trip is strangely vague. I know we slept on the bus and ate mostly bread, cheese, cold cuts and fruit. I do remember certain specific, redolent neo-ugly-American moments — blasting Traffic’s “Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” out of our open door and windows as we rumbled through small towns, leaving scraped streaks of chrome yellow on masonry walls as we squeezed down streets barely wider than the bus. And I recall our route around the country – Monterey, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende and Mexico City, then Cuernavaca, Acapulco, Mazatlan, Nogales. But forty years later, out of all those hot, dusty, windy weeks, one single day remains distinct and extraordinary.

It was the golden age of hitchhiking – a year earlier a friend and I had hitchhiked from Nebraska to the east coast and back to look at colleges — and as we approached Mexico City from the northwest, we stopped to pick up a kid, maybe a year or two younger than us, who had his thumb out. Between our shaky Spanish and his shaky English, a friendship was struck up. Standing at the front of the bus, holding on to the chrome pole next to the driver’s seat, ducking to look out the giant windshield, for an hour our new pal Fernando guided us deep into the city and finally to his working class neighborhood.

He demanded we come up and meet his parents and siblings. His mother insisted she was going to serve these six hungry young American strangers a late lunch. His father required that we each guzzle a submarino, a tall tumbler of Coke over which a shot glass of tequila was held with two fingers and dropped like a depth charge – and then another and maybe one more.

We talked about the last Summer Olympics, which had taken place in Mexico City, and the two black American medalists who had raised their black-gloved fists as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. And our new friends were still excited about the 1970 World Cup, also staged in Mexico, in which their national team had gotten to the quarter-finals. Fernando or one of his buddies who’d joined the party asked us, “¿No es jugar al fútbol, fútbol mexicano, en los Estados Unidos, verdad?” — You don’t play Mexican football in the U.S, right?

He meant soccer, of course. And back in 1972, American kids did not play soccer – except, providentially, the six of us. I’d been the first to learn, at a nerdy international-themed summer camp when I was 12 and 13. Because soccer was foreign, it seemed cool, and   because none of the real athletes in Omaha was any better at it than we were, a few of us freaks and geeks had organized a tiny intramural league in high school.

“Sí,” I said, “en nuestra escuela hemos jugado en un equipo de fútbol mexicano!” – In our school we played on a soccer team!

By means of phone calls and shouts, Fernando instantly assembled a local team of six. Minutes later the block was cleared of all parked vehicles, and a few empty oil drums – traffic blockades and goalposts – had been lined up at each end. The street was at the bottom of a ravine, the opposing hillsides covered with multicolored cinderblock and stucco houses from bottom to top. In other words, it was a kind of natural stadium, each terrace and porch its own skybox. Children and adults stepped outside, sat on walls, leaned on posts, opened Cokes and Coronas. And awash in the preternaturally perfect August light of six o’clock, the game began.

Until that day we had played only on grass, but years of school-recess asphalt kickball had prepared us, more or less, for the hyperspeed and crazy bounces of street fútbol. And the pre-game tequila probably made our pothole contusions and gravel-studded abrasions less painful. We had a goalie, but our positioning otherwise was highly ambiguous, with backs racing upfield to shoot, and forwards falling back to defend our oil drums.

The most glorious and dreamlike part of the experience was the spectator mob. There were 100 people watching, maybe 150, but the loud, happy chants and cheers – provoked by any and all dramatic action, whether committed by a local kid or a gringo — made it feel like a crowd of thousands. At half-time a raspador, a vendor of fruit-flavored shaved ice — an actual concessionaire! — wheeled his cart onto the block.

The game ended as sunset approached and church bells struck seven. I’m pretty sure we didn’t play for a regulation 90 minutes. The thin air at seven-thousand-feet-plus was rough on us boys from the low plains. And we lost decisively – Mexico City 5 (I think), Omaha 2 – but we scored, twice, playing their national pastime on their street. We were breathless, sweaty, filthy, bloody, bruised and totally,  deeply, existentially gratified.

We awoke at sunrise, performed quick ablutions in the family’s single bathroom, ate Fernando’s mother’s breakfast of scrambled eggs and tortillas, offered money that was refused and refused again, reboarded the bus and headed out, on the road again, more than ever ready for adventures.

But nothing else on the trip – not our first visit to Las Vegas (Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing, published the previous fall, was a kind of sacred text), not our first visit to Disneyland (the Merry Pranksters had been headed for the World’s Fair in 1964), not the archetypal young California blonde speeding around a curve in Big Sur and smashing her yellow convertible into our parked bus – was as wondrous as our impromptu soccer match in that ragged, random, impossibly hospitable Mexico City barrio whose name I don’t remember and maybe never knew.

The process of recalling and reconstructing my faded and fragmentary memories of that ancient journey and heroic game has been as much like writing fiction as nonfiction. If it were fiction, I might have an unexpected and ironic and life-changing encounter years later, as an adult, with Fernando. Real life was not so obliging. In a piece of fiction, surely, the bonds forged over the course of 7,000 miles on a bus — we few, we happy few, we band of brothers — would endure yet be tested and twisted over the decades. In fact, I haven’t been in touch with any of my fellow travelers for more than 30 years; two of them died young, the mescaline-eater by his own hand at age 41. In a work of fiction, I might right now have the dusty, yellowed old “Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” cassette in front of me, an elegiac artifact of my youth, as I construct a remembrance of things past. But I unsentimentally tossed out all my old albums long ago. I discovered on Google just now that that particular tape sells for between $60 and $500, depending on condition.

As it happens, however, I am in Mexico, at the end of a month-long stay, longer than I’ve spent in the country since 1972. I’m on the sunny rooftop of a house on a street called the Alley of the Dead, overlooking a hillside covered with a jumble of brown and white and yellow and red stucco houses. I hear afternoon church bells. And in the schoolyard at the bottom of the hill, children are kicking a soccer ball.

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{ Kings County }

With my pals Steve Bodow of The Daily Show and Gatz, Paul Simms of News Radio and The New Yorker, and Chris Bannon of WNYC,  I’ve recently created a new variety show for WNYC called Kings County.  I’m the host. My co-hosts and guests so far have included Kristen Schaal, Reggie Watts, Francesca Ramsey, Lucy Sexton, Paul Rudnkick, the musicians Chairlift, Eleanor Friedberger, Sean Lennon & Charlotte Kemp Muhl, the magician Steve Cuiffo, and the comedians Kurt Braunohler, Jessi Klein and Wyatt Cenac. You can read about what we’re intending here and here. And here’s a review of the second show — the live 2-hour performance, not the hour-long broadcast.

The first season aired in June and July, 2012, and you can stream or download those shows right here. 

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This is the foreword to Karla Gower’s Public Relations and the Press: The Troubled Embrace, published by Northwestern University Press in 2007.

In New York a century ago, as Professor Karla Gower so ably tells us, a 27twenty-seven-year- old man named Ivy Lee established Parker and Lee, the first firm devoted exclusively to managing spin, and thereby became a founder of the new business of public relations. Yet while tThe term “public relations”public relations (PR) hadn’t been coined in 1904, but “press agents” were already familiar metropolitan figures—and automatically suspect, as they have remained. The muckraking New York reporter and photographer Jacob Riis, in an 1899 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, acidly referred to an employee of the corrupt local political machine as “Tammany’s press agent.”

Indeed, press agentry and ad hocad hoc public relations—the shaping of newspaper and magazine coverage to benefit particular private interests—had been powerfully, increasingly in evidence for most of the 19th nineteenth century. The mass media and mass merchandisers were born in the 1830s and 1840s as cities boomed and high-speed printing presses made newspapers and magazines cheap and plentiful. And peddlers of every sort of peddler saw the burgeoning press as a prime new promotional venue. They could buy official advertisements, but even better, they could wheedle and pressure writers and editors to promote their wares for free—clothes, furniture, gadgets, plays, books, ideas, politicians, whatever.

The embrace was troubling to some of those writers and editors from the get-go. “It is a pity,” wrote one in theThe New England Magazine in 1835, “that some efficient method could not be adopted to do away with the present system of indiscriminate puffery. Little or no reliance can be placed on newspaper opinions about a new book; and we are sorry to add that 2 contemporary periodicals . . . cannot he consulted with a better chance of finding out the truth. The editors of journals seem to conspire with . . . publishers of books to practice the grossest deceptions upon the reading community.” Not coincidentally, the presidential election of 1840 was the first in which candidates were marketed in the modern sense: shrewd public relations spin—a campaign featuring miniature log cabins, raccoon mascots, and whiskey-jug trinkets— refashioned the rich Whig candidate William Henry Harrison as a rustic man of the people, and helped win him the presidency. Newspapers at the time were unabashedly partisan, their news coverage extravagantly opinionated. The great journalist Horace Greeley, before he founded the New York Tribune in 1841, had been editor of an official Whig party organ. Moreover, the distinctions between the emerging forms of mass communication—between journalism and public relations—were blurry or non-nonexistent, and the movement of practitioners moved between the occupations through a revolving door.

Indeed, 70seventy years before Ivy Lee hung his public relations shingle, the first great PR visionary took up the trade—that is, hadwith the crucial insight that stirring up public attention could be the basis of a business. Phineas T. Barnum was a young newspaper publisher and editor—he’d founded a weekly in Connecticut at age 19nineteen—but at 25twenty-five, in 1834, he moved to New York City to become a new species of impresario: as a former newspaperman, he understood that getting the papers to write about his eclectic entertainments, flatteringly or not, would sell tickets. As long as his fabrications were interesting—such as the very elderly black woman he put on display, claiming she had been George Washington’s nursemaid a century earlier—the public debate over their veracity became part of the show business. When Barnum was promoting the first American concert tour of the celebrated Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, he used the newspapers to generate such excitement that whenas 3 her transatlantic ship arrived in New York, fully a tenth of the city’s population thronged the docks to get a glimpse, or in any way join in the PR-induced hysteria.

The propagation of the romantic, archetypal vision of the wild and free American wWest was the great American public relations project of the 19th nineteenth century. One man, Edward Z. C. Judson, a journalist- turned- impresario and New York contemporary of Barnum’s, was its great visionary mastermind. Under the pseudonym Ned Buntline, Judson produced magazines (Western Literary Journal, Ned Buntline’s Own, Ned), plays (Scouts of the Prairie), and numberlessinnumerable pulp novels that essentially invented the mythic popular conception of the “wWild wWest”—and did so in real time, from the 1840s through the 1880s, by recruiting and promoting real emblematic figures such as the 26twenty-six-year-old hunter and Aarmy scout Buffalo Bill Cody to star in literary and theatrical versions of their exploits.
One of those emblematic figures, Bat Masterson, was skillful at public relations on his own behalf: his iconic reputation as a western gunslinger was apparently based on a total of three gunfights, in only one of which, at age 22, he actually killed someone. Contrary to the usual professional route, from journalism to PR, Masterson did the reverse, around age 40 becoming a newspaperman. He spent the last 14 years of his life as a writer, editor and executive for the New York Morning Telegraph.

Some of those emblematic figures, such as the lawman Wyatt Earp, did extravagant and highly effective public relations work on behalf of their own behalfscareers. Bat Masterson, Earp’s lifelong friend and fellow iconic gunslinger, was reputed to have shot and killed dozens of people; in fact, he may have killed no more than one man in a gunfight. After leaving law enforcement, he became a boxing promoter and then a celebrated newspaperman. At age 50fifty, 4 he moved east and spent the last 14fourteen years of his life as a columnist, editor, and executive for the New York New York Morning Telegraph.

Meanwhile, the wWest was being settled once and for all, and corporate public relations was used to tidy up the collateral damage. In the course of a long, violent strike by workers at Rockefeller-owned coal mines in Colorado in 1914, the local militia killed several miners and their families, and a New York public relations counselor was engaged to deal with the bad press attending “the Ludlow massacre.” He spun wildly, putting out the story that the deaths of women and children in Ludlow had been caused by an accidentally overturned stove—the kind of claim that prompted the poet Carl Sandburg to declare him “below the level of the hired gunman.” The Rockefellers’ PR man was Ivy Lee.

Not all journalists are honest, disinterested searchers for the truth, and not all public relations people are fabulists and liars. Some of my best friends work in PR. While I never expect them to tell me the whole truth about the people or products they represent, as far as I know they’ve never lied to me, either. And as schedulers and evangelists, they can be useful. But the basic tension is there: their jobs are to provide positive information about clients (and negative information about those clients’ rivals and enemies), and if that requires dissembling, they dissemble. They are interested in the truth only to the extent it reflects well (or not badly) on the people paying them.

They use journalists, but journalists use them, too. When I was editor- in- cheief of New York magazine in the 1990s, I got a call one day from a big-time PR man who represented the defendant in an infamous multi-multimillion-dollar lawsuit involving various well-known New Yorkers. He said he wanted to send over some information he thought I’d be interested in. That afternoon, I received a thick loose-leaf notebook filled with theretofore confidential documents, neatly tabbed and organized, that portrayed the defendant in a negative light. And one of my writers proceeded to report and write a story based partly on those documents. In the years since, I’ve occasionally run into the PR guy, who’s now a publisher and philanthropist. Each time, I think about our slightly skevey{AU:I’M NOT FAMILIAR WITH THIS WORD AND DON’T FIND IT IN THE DICTIONARY. DO YOU PERHAPS MEAN “SKETCHY”?} professional history, and I wonder how many scores of such transactions he had brokered over the years. I also sometimes run into the man he used me to besmirch, and always feel a frisson of guilt. A troubled embrace indeed. {AU: IT SEEMS TO ME THE PR MAN REPRESENTING THE DEFENDANT WOULD NEVER SEND AN EDITOR A FILE OF NEGATIVE INFO. ON HIS OWN CLIENT. DID HE ACTUALLY SEND A FILE ON ONE OF THE PLAINTIFFS, PERHAPS? (OR, ALTERNATIVELY, WAS THIS FELLOW ACTUALLY REPRESENTING ONE OF THE PLAINTIFFS, NOT THE DEFENDANT, IN THE CASE?) PLEASE CLARIFY.}{DEB:CAN YOU PLEASE CHECK ME ON THIS AND DELETE MY QUERY IF I’M OFF BASE? THAT IS, CAN YOU READ THIS PARAGRAPH AND SEE IF IT MAKES SENSE TO YOU AS IT STANDS? (IT SEEMS LIKE TOO OBVIOUS AN ERROR FOR THE WRITER TO MAKE…)}

As ever, public relations people do wield real power over media coverage and, thus, the rise and fall of reputations. At the relatively inconsequential end of the spectrum are handlers of Hollywood stars who permit or withhold their clients’ cooperation with the celebrity-hungry media. And then there are the PR people who are the gatekeepers to important figures of legitimate public interest–—corporate managementleaders, powerful government bureaucrats, elected officials.

Of course, much or most public relations power is granted by reporters and editors who accede to their demands and interference—for by letting PR people veto a particular journalist whom they deem insufficiently friendly, or agreeing not to broach certain subjects in interviews, or simply not pushing hard enough toward the truth. Publicists, like police, often exercise power over reporters simply because they can. And sometimes in this game of cat and mouse, journalists find it hard not to do the same. For instance, I’m surprised how often PR people, when they are negotiating access to their principals (as opposed to acting explicitly as spokespeople), make stupid or impolitic remarks, as if such behind-the-scenes conversations are inherently off the record; quoting them can be an irresistible bit of comeuppance.

A couple of years ago, after I wrote an article about the top executives of a large corporation, the chairman phoned and me and left a hurt and angry voice- mail: “What did I ever do to you,” he asked, “to deserve this?” It was odd and pathetic, not the way the way the game is supposed to be played. I let one of his underlings know about the message, and within an hour, the company’s PR chief was on the phone, her anxiety audible. She wanted to know if I was going to write about her boss’s unfortunate voice mail. No plan to do so, I told her, maybe or maybe not suppressing a small, evil smile, at least no time soon.

I don’t think any single PR person today has a dangerous amount of influence. But as this insightful volume by Professor Gower demonstrates, in the aggregate as a collective force, American public relations is staggeringly powerful. It’s probably fair to say that most major stories in the press, in every publication, and on every TV news program, were placed or impeded or significantly shaped by public relations professionals. When I was a magazine editor—of Spy as well as New York—I tried repeatedly to assign an epic piece of investigative journalism that would illustrate and deconstruct this tentacular, ubiquitous influence. My idea 7 was to take one day’s New York Times and try to detect the various PR fingerprints on every story in the paper. For whatever reason—the daunting scale of the project, or reporters’ fears of alienating in one fell swoop the entire public relations apparatus—I never managed to persuade anyone to do the piece.

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This is a chapter from Pleasure: The Architecture and Design of Rockwell Group, published by Universe in 2002.

Like primitive people who refuse to be photographed because they believe that the camera will steal their souls, creative people tend to resist the neat, reductive catch phrases that others stick on them. Robert Venturi has never much liked being called a postmodernist. And David Rockwell bridles a bit if you call him an entertainment architect.

What people usually mean by entertainment architecture is the very duh definition: the design of theaters, casinos, theme parks, circus facilities, stadiums, restaurants with confected back stories—venues for professional entertainment. The phrase is faintly patronizing, and Rockwell understandably resists being squeezed into the confines of the pigeonhole—of any itsy-bitsy pre-fab category.

In fact, what makes his firm’s work interesting is not so much the fact that they’re responsible for a lot of elaborately designed restaurants and theaters, but the fact that in all of the work the approach is that of an entertainer. To David Rockwell, the people who visit his buildings are audiences, and he is strenuously, even heroically dedicated to keeping those thousands of customers interested, engaged, amused, jazzed, awestruck, entertained by the physical space itself. Entertainment is by definition populist, eager to please almost any way it can—and therefore inherently vulgar. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown notwithstanding, serious contemporary architecture mostly loathes vulgarity. Most serious architects lack the hubba-hubba gene that architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Morris Lapidus had in spades. With the spectacular exceptions of the work of Venturi and Frank Gehry, serious contemporary architecture is very, very serious—poker-faced and cool, devoted to tastefulness above all. In an overwhelmingly Appolonian profession, Rockwell’s one of the Dionysians.

As a designer he says he’s interested in “friction . . . dissimilar things rubbing up against each other.” For the last century, we’ve known this as the collagist’s urge, of course, but I think it also constitutes a fundamentally childlike approach to design, design as a means of avoiding boredom and encouraging fun. Watch young children in their playrooms. A kid will mix radically disparate materials and textures and scales and species into a fantasy construction that has a story and makes entertaining sense to her—even if it looks motley or ridiculous to grownups who know that anime action figures and Lincoln Logs and chartreuse bubble wrap and Viewmaster slides and stuffed snakes and American Girl dolls “don’t go” together. Young children tend more toward the baroque than the minimalist. I think most kids would sign on to the Rockwell credo: “Walls don’t have to be white. Polite spaces don’t interest me.”

If I were going to invent a fictional childhood for David Rockwell, it would be hard to do better than the one he actually lived. His mother worked as a vaudeville dancer touring with Abbot and Costello, then as a choreographer in community theater on the New Jersey shore. When he was nine or so, he had two galvanizing cultural experiences more or less simultaneously: a day at the World’s Fair in New York (“It boggled my mind”) and a night on Broadway seeing his first show, Fiddler on the Roof. Then, a year later, his family picked up and moved to Guadalajara, Mexico—which meant that Rockwell spent his and his generation’s formative years watching bullfights and Cantinflas, essentially quarantined from U.S. pop culture as it exploded and started leeching its go-go sensibility into every nook and cranny of American life.

So a childhood fascination with theater—“the thrilling prospect,” as he says, “of controlling environments and stimulating audiences”—led in college to a fascination with architecture. “Architecture looked to me like theater you could move into,” he says. The impressionable Yanqui boy wandering through Mexican back streets and open-air markets (“I remember cast-in-place red concrete bullrings, and light filtering through trellises”) became the New York architect with an appreciation of vernacular craft, and a taste for the vivid. He went from being one kind of fish out of water in Guadalajara to a different sort of fish out of water in the architecture department at Cornell, a latent postmodernist in a modernist temple. His heroes in college were not Mies or Corbu, but sui generis genius vulgarians—Gaudí, Maxfield Parrish, Joseph Urban—visual entertainers whose love of color and spectacle and sentiment guaranteed their exclusion from the twentieth century’s canon.

And as the result of a fortuitous combination of temperament and timing, the David Rockwell approach to design caught two big zeitgeist waves.

The first wave was the one presaged by Venturi and Scott-Brown, the transformation of America into one vast, seamless mediadome. Architectural postmodernism is just one expression of a bigger paradigm shift toward the large-scale manufacture and consumption of storytelling and special effects and 24/7 fun. Traditional entertainment outlets have expanded madly during the last three decades—from two-screen movie theaters to six- to twelve- to twenty-screen multiplexes, from three TV channels to thirty to three hundred, from casinos only in Las Vegas to casinos all over the place. And every sort of built space (hotels, stores, restaurants, one’s living room, one’s car) became reconceived, during the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, as entertainment venues.

It’s hard to imagine more fertile ground on which to build a career like Rockwell’s. A cause and an effect of this shift has been a wholesale acceleration of the cultural metabolism: communication speeds up, fashion shifts more quickly, attention spans shorten, buildings are built and demolished in one generation. Under such hurly-burly conditions—more stuff competing for everyone’s attention, less opportunity for any given thing to grab anyone’s attention-making memorable movies and TV shows and stage shows and architecture becomes more and more about creating experiential jolts, new bits of holy-cow spectacle, what Rockwell calls “wow moments.”

Thus the success of his unapologetically attention-grabbing interiors; an architecture of special effects. He took Venturi and Scott-Brown’s ideas and ran with them gleefully, almost unselfconsciously, in a way that the originators have always seemed too anxious and dour to do themselves: Rockwell turned their “ducks” and “decorated sheds” inside out, making buildings that don’t just entertain passersby for a few seconds, but deepen and prolong the fantasy. Casinos, for instance, are the ultimate decorated sheds, never really extending their “theming” to the interiors of the gambling halls themselves. Yet at Rockwell’s Mohegan Sun casino, the half-real, half-synthetic Native American mythography is wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, immersive. To use the theatrical term of art, Rockwell breaks the casino’s fourth wall. He did the same thing with his sets for the Broadway production of the Rocky Horror Show, turning a large chunk of the stage into ersatz theater seating, thereby blurring the distinction between actors and audience in a show where that’s pretty much the whole point.

His success is significantly due, I think, to his visceral comfort with (or at least cheerful resignation to) the mutability and evanescence of life. He is not paralyzed by angst about posterity and architectural immortality. “There’s no way not to think about that,” he says, “but I try not to let it drive the creative process, and end up producing . . . Lincoln Center. The dream of being a master builder for all time is a mind fuck.” Again, the particulars of his life have inclined him to seize the moment and be here now: the peripatetic childhood, the immersion in the here-today-gone-tomorrow gestalt of theater, the early death of his father and then of his brother.

So in his work he embraces the ephemeral (colored light, LEDs, projected images) but not, crucially, the disposable. And yet in Rockwell’s highest-end work, the capital- and labor-intensive craft (millions of woven beads and an eighty-foot-high alabaster mountain at the Mohegan Sun casino, a cast glass wall at the Academy Awards theater) mitigate the pop insubstantiality. The buildings may be stage sets, but they’re awesome stage sets that will last as long as they need to last.
The second wave Rockwell caught is the generational shift toward Peter Pannishness. As a matter of style and etiquette adults today no longer regard adulthood as a fundamentally distinct zone from childhood; people born since World War II are driven by a pursuit of instant gratification and informality that used to be the exclusive province of children and teenagers. When I was young, parents did not wear blue jeans and sneakers, take bike rides, listen to rock-and-roll, watch cartoons on TV, buy comic books, play video games, go to science-fiction movies and theme parks without children, cultivate conoisseurship of cookies and ice cream or, when talking to friends about their jobs, ask, “Are you having fun?” Today they do.

Today people work and eat and shop and live in playhouses. And so David Rockwell—a forty-five-year-old man in sneakers and long hair who collects kaleidoscopes—designs buildings intended to please we middle-aged children. Rockwell has called his Pod restaurant in Philadelphia “a big jungle gym.” For adults, the pleasures of Cirque du Soleil (and Rockwell’s theaters for Cirque) are the childlike wonder they induce. The twenty-five-foot-high baseball cards at Turner Field in Atlanta, the cartoony Hollywood lobbies for Sony’s Lincoln Square theaters, and Animator’s Palate restaurant on the Disney cruise ships Disney Magic and Disney Wonder are all theatrical in a theme park sense, kiddie-esque special effects intended in each case primarily for adults.

Speaking of Disney, David Rockwell is obviously not the first American to make his name and fortune dreaming up recombinant entertainment experiences that mix storytelling and architecture and special effects. Indeed, he is working in an even older tradition, which Walt Disney revived and refined—that of P.T. Barnum, who put up grand, over-the-top buildings to house his extravaganzas, and whose genius was ignoring the conventional boundaries-between theaters and museums and circuses, between entertainment and education, public and private, high and low, fantasy and reality.

And it’s important to remember that fantasy feeds and shapes reality. As Disneyland helped inspire a generation of earnest architects and planners to invent New Urbanism, so have Rockwell’s never-never-land casinos in Connecticut inspired the Mohegans to reimagine and reanimate their own tribal culture. And so the phrase “entertainment architecture” doesn’t quite do the work justice: particularly given his wonder years in Mexico, a more apt pigeonhole might be a literary one from Latin America: David Rockwell, architecture’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century magical realist.

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This is the introduction to an edition of Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, published by Penguin Classics in 2009.

When this novel was first published, I was a college sophomore, riveted by news coverage of the young kidnapped-heiress-turned-revolutionary-robber Patty Hearst, and the only student enrolled in a course on “the literature of revolution” taught by a visiting West German professor. Thus I discovered Heinrich Böll, the great bien-pensant voice of West Germany. Upon reading the book now, a third of a century later, my first, very parochial American impulse was to wonder why the U.S. had never produced any real equivalent to Böll.

Sure, the vast majority of fiction writers (and storytellers and artists in every medium) are men and women of the liberal left, like Böll. But no one in the first rank of American literature’s Greatest Generation devoted so much of his or her work to depicting and deconstructing contemporary America from a particular ideological angle, and then extended those politics into real life as a premier spokesperson. Norman Mailer’s sheer perversity disqualifies him. Don DeLillo writes splendid socio-political fiction (Americana, White Noise), but he’s nearly Thomas Pynchonesque in his reclusive silence on the issues of the day. Interestingly, it’s three women — Joan Didion, Susan Sontag and Toni Morrison — who probably come closest to being America’s Bölls. But despite Didion’s laconic, realistic novels about contemporary politics and policy (A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, The Last Thing He Wanted), her profound disinclination to making public pronouncements is entirely un-Böll-like. None of Susan Sontag’s novels are politicized chronicles of the way we live now. And given the mainly historical settings of Toni Morrison’s fiction, as well as her tight focus on African-Americans and tendency to magical realism (our Günter Grass, maybe?), she’s no Böll, either. Philip Roth has written plenty of political fiction (I Married A Communist, The Plot Against America), but he has never been much for real-world commentary. And in the Roth novel most relevant to this one, American Pastoral, he takes an unambiguously horrified view of the violent New Left radicals with whom Böll was a liberal quasi-sympathizer. Indeed, among America’s best-known serious novelists who were born between the world wars, a majority made political noise mainly for being illiberal after the 60s — Mailer and John Updike (and Roth) as alleged misogynists and/or anti-feminists, Saul Bellow and Tom Wolfe as bona fide conservatives. And talent and subject matter and style aside, no younger novelist can emerge as the American Böll because the career slot he occupied — first-class fiction writer as household name and galvanizing national voice — has long since ceased to exist in the U.S. “Art is always a good hiding-place,” Böll said upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, a year before publishing The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, “for intellectual explosives and social time bombs.” Such a declaration by a novelist today, at least in the United States, would be an act of fantastic, self-dramatizing hubris. But back in the day in West Germany it was actually true.

In this country Böll is more famous than any of his individual books, but Katharina Blum is surely the best-known – thanks in part to its brevity, its straightforwardness, and its publication during that brief moment (circa 1970-85) when educated Americans were obliged to have a passing familiarity with important new non-English-language novels and films. Volker Schlöndorff’s movie adaptation, released just after the book’s English translation appeared, also helped.

It’s no wonder the book instantly became a film. (Actually, two films: it was also the basis for an American TV movie, The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck, starring Marlo Thomas and Kris Kristofferson.) Böll’s narrative hops around chronologically to keep things interesting, but the simple story (true love, oppressed heroine, good versus evil) takes place mainly over the course of a few days, and is told in the familiar form of the police procedural — something like Law and Order: Special Political Victims Unit. And there’s also a venerable cinematic history involving lovable crooks (The Outlaw, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid) and officially persecuted innocents (The Wrong Man, Billy Budd).

The late critic D.J. Enright, who admired Böll, once wrote that “there are three categories of characters in Böll’s fictions: the misused or unlucky near-saint; the rascal, good at heart, given to venial if not commendable misdemeanors; and the unvarnished villain, more commonly a bully or hypocrite, greedy, gross, corrupt, than a monster of evil.” And so it is here, in this story is set in “a certain city,” apparently Cologne, in 1974. Katharina is the misused and unlucky near-saint, a working-class divorcée in her 20s who works as a housekeeper and runs a catering business on the side — a woman the book describes as a “nice, smart, virtually blameless person,” “extremely attractive” but “almost prudish, in sexual matters.” (The secondary near-saints are her employers, the liberal corporate lawyer Hubert Blorna and his architect wife Trude.) Katharina happens to attend a Carnival party at her godmother’s apartment, where she falls head over heels for Ludwig Götten, a stranger about her age. Ludwig is the book’s good-at-heart rascal, and beginning the morning after their 12-hour affair, Katharina is smeared by police and a hysterically reactionary tabloid newspaper as his co-conspirator and long-time lover. The Porsche-driving tabloid reporter on the story, Werner Tötges — Töt means “kill” — is the book’s main villain: a gross, corrupt bully.

Since (spoiler alert) Katharina confesses to homicide on the third page of the novel, the unfolding narrative mysteries concern only how much she knew of Ludwig’s identity, whether and how she helped him elude capture, to what hideous lengths the tabloid press will go to besmirch her, and the nature of her involvement with Alois Sträubleder, a rich businessman client of Hubert Blorna’s. The narrator, although never identified, is no omniscient construct but an actual (fictional) person who knows the principal characters personally. And given lines like these — “Too much is happening in this story. To an embarrassing, almost ungovernable degree, it is almost pregnant with action” — the narrator seems to be a fiction writer…maybe, say, Heinrich Böll. The deliberately pedantic subtitle — How Violence Can Develop and Where It Can Lead — promotes the conceit that this is a nonfiction chronicle drawn from police documents and conversations with lawyers involved in the case. And yet for all his just-the-facts approach, the narrator is also an incorrigible ironist, such as when he notes, in an aside about wiretap surveillance, that we all ought to “telephone more often…since we can never know who may derive pleasure from such a call.” By portraying its hero’s sudden nightmarish descent with both a smirky casualness and a studious neutrality, the book is reminiscent of an earlier 20th century German-language writer: Katharina Blum is something like Böll’s social-realist Gregor Samsa or Josef K.

A description of her interrogation by police and prosecutors is typical: “At about 5:00 P.M. she had actually been induced to accept another pot of tea and a sandwich (ham).” Concerning the Böll novel immediately preceding Katharina Blum, D.J. Enright wrote, “One difficulty is to establish, whatever the occasion, whether or not Böll is being gratuitously bureaucratic, wantonly tongue-in-cheek, supererogatorily documentary.” But is that really a difficulty? He is clearly being all three most of the time, and the effect of those mixed motives is to save this novel from being either a generic fairy tale or over-earnest agitprop. And it’s simply in the nature of Böll’s writerly voice. He was German, after all, and he has more than a bit of the detail-crazy precisionist in him — which he knows, and self-consciously mocks, even as he’s indulging himself. Consider, for instance, these three sentences near the beginning of his Nobel lecture: “The table upon which I am writing this is 76.5 cm high, its top is 69.5 by 111 cm.

It has turned legs, a drawer, seems to be seventy to eighty years old, was a possession of a great-aunt of my mother’s, who, after her husband had died in a madhouse and she herself had moved into a smaller flat, sold it to her brother, my wife’s grandfather. And so, after my wife’s grandfather had died, it came into our possession, a despised and rather despicable piece of furniture of no value, knocking around somewhere, no one knows exactly where, until it surfaced during a move and proved to have been damaged by a bomb: somewhere, at some time or other, a piece of shrapnel had bored a hole through its top during the Second World War.”

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is a very contemporary novel — its ripped-from-the-headlines documentary approach, its liberal-left critique of sinister powers-that-be — but even more striking are its extremely old-fashioned qualities. When the author/narrator addresses the reader directly (“Warning: there is worse to come” or “We now return contritely to the foreground”), the asides seem premodern as much as postmodern. The novel is a moralizing melodrama, with its aforementioned villains and heroes, and also an old-school love story in which the lovemaking is not depicted. Chaste Katharina’s faith in romantic destiny — “he was simply the One who was to come, and I would have married and had children with him” – as well as her victimization seem downright Victorian. The recherché phrase in the book’s title, “lost honor,” is Katharina’s own, and her act of violence is a spontaneous retaliation for a man’s unbearable ungentlemanliness.

Of course, the early-70s way of describing sweet old-fashioned Katharina’s breaking point would be to say she was “radicalized” by the dehumanizing mob anger incited against her by the military-industrial-media complex. And indeed, when her protector Hubert Blorna finally starts to make a Molotov cocktail “to throw into the editorial offices of the News,” his wife Trude stops him, calling his impulse “spontaneous petit-bourgeois romantic anarchism.” It’s accurate, but it’s also a joke by Böll on generation-of-’68 yuppies. In this novel Böll doesn’t explicitly sympathize with left-wing radicalism — Ludwig’s crimes in the end have no apparent political motive — but rather with the good-hearted liberals (the Blornas) and apoliticals (Katharina) tyrannized by the reactionaries.

The novel’s cool, fussy, pseudo-nonfictional narrative voice works especially well because it’s in such strong counterpoint to the manic fabulism of the newspaper articles and headlines that drive the action. (It’s analogous to the comedy that derived, a decade later, from the contrast between the deadpan mock-documentary style of This Is Spinal Tap and the over-the-top absurdity of its subject.) There have been other unscrupulously fast-and-loose newspapers in fiction (The Daily Beast and The Daily Brute in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, The City Light in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfires of the Vanities) and, even more, in film (The Front Page, Meet John Doe, Ace In the Hole), but probably none as powerful or as egregious as The News in Katharina Blum. By means of screaming front-page headlines (OUTLAW’S SWEETHEART and MURDERER’S MOLL) and grotesque distortions and fabrications, a young woman’s dreamy night of love is recast as the prearranged meeting of a sociopathic left-wing Bonnie and Clyde. Hubert Blorna tells a News reporter that Katharina is “intelligent, cool, and level-headed,” a description rendered in the paper as “ice-cold and calculating.” And Blorna’s reply to a News reporter about her possible criminality — “I know that all kinds of people are capable of committing a crime….Katharina? Out of the question” — becomes “Katharina is entirely capable of committing a crime.” When Tötges uses a disguise to interview Katharina’s sick mother in her hospital bed, Mrs. Blum’s rhetorical question — “[W]hy did it have to come to this?” — becomes, in his article, “It was bound to come to this.” That’s because, the reporter explains, part of his job is “helping simple people to express themselves more clearly.”

Böll’s News — Zietung in German — is only nominally fictitious, barely even that. At the beginning of the novel, he gives his own winkingly disingenuous version of the standard disclaimer: “The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional nor fortuitous, but unavoidable.” Europe has always had its sensationalist, irresponsible “boulevard press” — what the British and Americans call tabloids — but Germany’s right-wing Bild-Zeitung is the modern apotheosis of the type, given its size and influence. Since shortly after its founding in 1952 it has been the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe; it’s circulation in Germany is proportionately ten times as large as the largest national papers in the U.S.

Naturally, when the ultra-left-wing Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) formed in 1970 and began its campaign of political violence, the Bild-Zeitung went to town. Popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, after the names of two of its leaders, in one week in May 1970 RAF squads led by Ulrike Meinhof bombed the Hamburg headquarters of Bild-Zeitung’s parent company and broke Andreas Baader out of jail, after which the spiral of violence and reaction went into a mad overdrive that lasted for years.

On the one hand, there was plenty to discomfit West German liberals and the fair-minded of all political persuasions, such as the Bild-Zeitung’s demonization of a university professor accused of lending an apartment to Baader-Meinhof members in 1970 (the episode that Böll says inspired Katharina Blum), and the government’s 1972 “anti-radical decrees” banning people with questionable politics from teaching and other public-sector jobs. After Böll published an essay in 1972 suggesting that press coverage of the RAF had made a fair trial for Meinhof problematic, the Bild-Zeitung called him a terrorist fellow traveler, and police searched his country house. Given the paper’s fanatical coverage of Baader-Meinhof, Böll declared, its M.O. wasn’t merely “cryptofascist anymore, not fascistoid, but naked fascism, agitation, lies and dirt.”

On the other hand, the movement comprising Baader-Meinhof and kindred groups, unlike its small and comparatively ethical Weathermen counterparts in America, posed a serious threat. According to the West German government at the time, the RAF had 1,200 members and 6,000 active supporters in a country less than a third the size of the U.S. In just one month in the spring of 1972, they carried out six bombings — once again of the Bild-Zeitung’s corporate headquarters, of police and prosecutors’ offices, and of two U.S. military installations. In all, the RAF killed 34 people, several of them in kidnappings and targeted assassinations.

Into the middle of this maelstrom, 56-year-old Heinrich Böll tossed his stick of social dynamite, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Or: How Violence Can Develop and Where It Can Lead. It became a bestseller, and once more, of course, his political opponents accused him of being an apologist for terrorism, even though he had been punctilious in the novel about criticizing anti-terrorist hysteria rather than defending the politics or tactics of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. And when RAF members assassinated the highest-ranking judge in West Berlin a few months after the book came out, Böll condemned the killing. In response, the imprisoned RAF leaders, including Baader and Meinhof, issued a statement calling his liberal bluff: “What else did Böll mean in his Katharina Blum, if not that the shooting of a representative of the ruling power apparatus is morally justifiable?” At last, the right and the far left were in agreement: in his fiction, they both insisted, he had effectively legitimized and even glorified politically correct murder. Nevertheless, in his next novel, The Safety Net, Böll stayed with the subjects of left-wing political violence, morally bankrupt Establishment media, and the self-perpetuating cycles of paranoia and security overreach.

A few years ago, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of the work of the painter Gerhard Richter — another German cultural god of a certain age for whom the spectacle of the Red Army Faction became an irresistible subject. The exhibit included Richter’s blurry black-and-white photo-based portraits of Baader and Meinhof. He calls the series “October 18, 1977,” after the date on which Baader and two comrades committed suicide in prison. (Meinhof killed herself in prison in1976.) There was some predictable tsk-tsking among conservative American critics over this elegiac depiction of anti-American, anti-capitalist guerillas, but given that the MoMA show opened in New York City only a few months after the 9/11 attacks, it was surprising how little brouhaha it generated, even in the tabloid Post, New York’s own Bild-Zeitung.

However, America’s panicky overreactions to the Al Qaeda attacks — the USA Patriot Act, the warrantless wiretapping, the demonization of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag, the White House press secretary warning commentators that “you have to be careful what you say” — inevitably brought to mind West Germany’s Katharina Blum moment in the 1970s. The fact that three of the 9/11 ringleaders had studied together in Germany — indeed, in Hamburg, where the RAF had bombed the Bild-Zeitung’s corporate headquarters — only added to the sense of twisted flashback.

Fortunately for us, back in the late 60s and early 70s, when the U.S. endured its own minor-league flurry of New Left bombings by William Ayres and company, there was no politicized American tabloid press, no Rupert Murdochian New York Post, no Rush Limbaugh, no Fox News. We did get our taste of that kind of willful, damn-the-facts fear-mongering during the 2008 presidential election, when Barack Obama’s opponents portrayed the candidate as a crypto-socialist Weatherman sleeper agent, a man who dared (in Governor Palin’s phrase) to “pal around with terrorists.” These transatlantic then-and-now resonances recall Karl Marx’s famous line about history repeating, the idea that “historical facts and personages occur…twice…the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Although in the links between Katharina Blum and 21st century America there’s also at least one instance where it was farce the first time and tragedy the second: to read Böll’s fictional Zeitung screed concerning Katharina’s treatment by police — “Can it be denied that our methods of interrogation are too mild? Are we to continue to treat with humanity those who commit inhuman acts?” — one can’t help but think of the Bush Administration’s ongoing justifications for its torture of captured Al Qaeda operatives. And so maybe even better in this context than Marx is his American contemporary’s take on historical recurrences. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “but it rhymes.”

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This is an entry from City Secrets Movies: The Ultimate Insider’s Guide to Cinema’s Hidden Gems, edited by Robert Kahn and published by Universe in 2009.

You may think you have little or no interest in watching experimental films. And you may think you have little or no interest in watching a 77-year-old silent documentary. Not long ago I operated under both of these misapprehensions myself, and curing the first led directly to the cure of the second.

Jeff Scher is an experimental filmmaker of some renown in the low-renown world of experimental film. I got to know him because he was the boyfriend (and then the husband) of a friend of mine. When I first sat down to watch his films a couple of years after we’d met, I was a little anxious: what if I was bored or confused or repelled by them? Instead, I experienced something like the aesthetic-platonic version of that stupid moment where the Guy sees the Girl without glasses for the first time and sputters – “W-why, Miss Johnson! You’re – you’re beautiful!” I won’t try to describe the films here. But they’re all produced on old-fashioned celluloid, they’re all short (Sid, a comedy starring a dog named Sid, is three minutes long; Grand Central, a moody cinematic poem set in Grand Central Station, runs fifteen minutes), and they’re all gorgeous. And unlike most art called “experimental,” they’re gloom-free, pleasurable, even uplifting.

So once I realized Jeff was a kind of genius, I started relying on him for suggestions of movies to rent. And among the best of those – available from Netflix.com — was Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, a documentary made in 1927 by the director Walter Ruttman. It’s an amazingly rich, cinematically revolutionary, Koyaanisqatsi-esque day-in-the-life-of-a-city, with black-and-white images quick-cut to the (original) score. And given the city and the moment — Berlin on the verge of the Nazi nightmare – the film seems all the more resonant and beautiful and sad.

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{ books }

This is my newest novel, now out in paperback, and you can order your own copy right now from or or or .

The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle both named it one of the best novels of 2012.

You can read the first chapter here. And watch a cool promotional video here or listen to  songs that feature in the book here.  Here’s my publisher’s synopsis, and here are their book club discussion questions. Here’s a piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal about writing a novel in the first person for the first time. (And you can judge this book by its cover: Design Observer named it one of the best of 2012.)

“The arc of the book,” according to the review in Vanity Fair  (by the playwright Jon Robin Baitz), “is beautifully drawn. This is Andersen’s best book to date, which makes it a great American novel.”

Laura Lippman in The Guardian: “As a novelist, Andersen is pretty outstanding.”

The Washington Post — which named True Believers one of the best novels of 2012, calls it “a big, swinging novel you’ll want to check out,” “smart,” “a rambling, colorful story full of witty insights” with “plenty to keep us entertained” that “could be the most rambunctious meeting your book club has for a long time.”

Fortune:  “Exhilarating…accessible and often funny…an absorbing, well-told tale. It’s also the best reverie on the 1960s and their legacy that I’ve seen.”

The San Francisco Chronicle says it’s a“convincing,”“funny,” “fiendishly smart, insightful and joyously loopy novel.”

According to The Winnipeg Free Press it’s “an unmitigated success” whose “plot is nigh-on perfect” and “shifts back and forth in time are seamless.”

USA Today:  “This intelligent and insightful coming-of-age flashback…Think The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Atonement, a ’60s-era female Holden Caulfield. Andersen is an agile storyteller, alternating convincingly between Hollander then and Hollander now,” and “builds suspense” while “impressively” providing “emotionally  accurate depictions of life and events in the ’60s” and “witty, occasionally even profound observations about the ’60s and today.”

The starred review in Booklist  says that “Andersen creates spellbinding suspense. This is an ambitious and remarkable novel, wonderfully voiced, about memory, secrets, guilt, and the dangers of certitude. Moreover, it asks essential questions about what it means to be an American and, in a sense, what it means to be America. Andersen’s best yet.”

The Atlantic: “could plausibly be included in the same class as Philip Roth’s American Pastoral”

The Sunday New York Times Book Review : “a novel about the powerful influence literature can exert on life,” “a historical romance about the 1960s” in which  “Andersen is doing something harder than the novel’s amiable, energized surface might suggest.”

And Brain Pickings calls it one of the two “essential” summer-of-2012 novels: “As absorbing as the story is, what makes the novel spellbinding is [the heroine’s] fascinating, layered character — at once brilliant and irreverent, brimming with equal parts intelligence and humor. A master of simple yet tremendously evocative narrative, [Andersen] moves swiftly between well-timed wit, without a hint of smugness.”

Scott Turow says this: “This witty, imaginative novel is one part bildungsroman, one part political thriller and one part contemplation on age — and in all aspects wonderful reading.”

Gary Shteyngart says this: “Kurt Andersen’s best yet. The man is operating on some far-out level that bends time and space to his will. True Believers hits all the right notes and reads like a goddamn dream.”

And Gayle King of CBS This Morning says this: “It’s a doozy. I was blown away.”

Here’s a Los Angeles Times piece about the book and me, and some  interviews I’ve done about the book:

Reviews of True Believers

Barnes and Noble Review :  “His mind is a fine-gauge net in the ocean of American culture…. deeply wise…Andersen’s control of his subject is so complete.”

Booklist : “Andersen creates spellbinding suspense. This is an ambitious and remarkable novel, wonderfully voiced, about memory, secrets, guilt, and the dangers of certitude. Moreover, it asks essential questions about what it means to be an American and, in a sense, what it means to be America. Andersen’s best yet.”

BusinessWeek:  “Brisk and zeitgeisty…Andersen has a keen eye for irony…Like a Cold War spy novelist, Andersen creates a world of shifting identities.”

Brain Pickings :“As absorbing as the story is, what makes the novel spellbinding is [the heroine’s] fascinating, layered character — at once brilliant and irreverent, brimming with equal parts intelligence and humor. Andersen’s a master of simple yet tremendously evocative narrative.”

Fortune:  “Exhilarating…accessible and often funny…an absorbing, well-told tale. It’s also the best reverie on the 1960s and their legacy that I’ve seen.”

Huntington News :“Tour de force is an overused phrase but I think Kurt Andersen has achieved one in True Believers.”

Kirkus: “Fun…smart.”

Las Vegas City Life : “His writing is as entertaining as ever…few writers of fiction are able to seamlessly weave historical fact into the fabric of fiction as well as Andersen.”

The New Yorker: “A diverting political mystery, which also serves as a vehicle for keen cultural criticism.”

New York Times Book Review :  “A novel about the powerful influence literature can exert on life…Andersen is doing something harder than the novel’s amiable, energized surface might suggest….a historical romance about the 1960s [that] reminded me…of the James Michener epics I read and loved.”

The Onion‘s A.V. Club: “The novel presents itself as Karen’s memoir in progress, and she’s a superb narrator, captivating yet slippery. A-“

The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Full of twists and turns, popular culture references, spook-talk, black ops, deception, and duplicity. True Believers is ambitious.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Persuasively detailed re-creation of the 1960s and equally sharp portrait of contemporary realities. Clever…smart and accessible, a book as entertaining as it is illuminating.”

San Francisco Chronicle : “Kurt Andersen’s fiendishly smart, insightful and joyously loopy novel.”

Shelf Awareness “Kurt Andersen brings all the wit he honed at the Harvard Lampoon (and later at Spy), as well as the probing eye for cultural details shown in his previous novels, Turn of the Century and Heyday. Andersen’s sympathetic heroine brings a smart, funny voice to the political and cultural ambiguities of the last 50 years.”

Time Out Chicago: “Compelling political-thriller pacing.”

USA Today: “This intelligent and insightful coming-of-age flashback…Think The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Atonement, a ’60s-era female Holden Caulfield. Andersen is an agile storyteller, alternating convincingly between Hollander then and Hollander now,” “emotionally  accurate depictions of life” and “witty, occasionally even profound observations about the ’60s and today.”

Winnipeg Free Press : “Andersen’s third novel is a hybrid — a literate suspense story set in the present married to thoughtful historical fiction. And this grafting of two genres is an unmitigated success. His shifts back and forth in time are seamless. The plot is nigh-on perfect.”

Vanity Fair : “The arc of the book is beautifully drawn. This is Andersen’s best book to date, which makes it a great American novel.”

The Washington Post : “A big, swinging novel you’ll want to check out, a colorful story full of witty insights [with] plenty to keep us entertained.”

  Karen Hollander is Tweeting!

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MY LATEST NOVEL, True Believers, was published in 2012. You can read the first chapter right now right here. And buy a copy at or or or . “This is Andersen’s best book to date,“ Jon Robin Baitz wrote in Vanity Fair, which makes it a great American novel.” Fortune‘s critic called it “the best reverie on the 1960s and their legacy,” and Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic said that it “could plausibly be included in the same class as Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.” According to Booklist, “Andersen creates spellbinding suspense. This is an ambitious and remarkable novel, wonderfully voiced, about memory, secrets, guilt, and the dangers of certitude. Moreover, it asks essential questions about what it means to be an American and, in a sense, what it means to be America. Andersen’s best yet.” The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle called True Believers one of the best novels of the year.

MY PREVIOUS BOOK was nonfiction — Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America, which germinated in early 2009 as a cover story for Time. It’s a long essay but a short book. My argument is that the 2008-09 shock to the economic system and resulting national flux should enable us to rethink ingrained habits as a nation and as individuals, and focus more on the things that make us authentically happy by rediscovering American traditions of realism, pragmatism and common sense. Not everyone has taken advantage of the flux and new beginning in the ways I’d hoped.

MY NOVEL Heyday was published by Random House in 2007, and won the Langum Prize as the best American historical novel of the year. It was a New York Times bestseller (as well as a Booksense, Publishers Weekly and Wall Street Journal bestseller). The story takes place in the middle of the 19th century, and the reviews called it “a major work” of “gorgeous, robust prose,” “exhilarating,” “enthalling,” “thrilling,” “joyful,” “sweet,” “stirringly original,” “uproarious,” “delightful” and “superb.” Find out more about the book here. The paperback came out in 2008. And there are editions in German (Neuland) and Italian (Mondo nuovo).

IN THE FALL OF 2006, Miramax Books published Spy: The Funny Years, a history and anthology of Spy magazine that I helped produce along with Graydon Carter and George Kalogerakis. It received shockingly good reviews.

MY FIRST NOVEL was Turn of the Century. It was a New York Times Notable Book and a national bestseller. You can read an excerpt that The New Yorker published here.

There are U.S. hardcover (Random House, 1999) and paperback (Delta, 2000) editions, as well as a casette-tape audio version and downloadable audio version, and British hardcover and paperback editions (Headline, 1999 & 2000). Translations have been published in Japanese

(Hayakawa, 2000), Dutch (Eeuwwisseling, Contact, 1999), German (Tollhaus der Möglichkeiten [Madhouse of Possibilities], Karl Blessing Verlag, 2000), French (Riches & Célèbres, Calman-Levy, 2002) and, theoretically, Chinese. The very cool cover on the U.S. hardcover edition was designed by Chip Kidd; the British hardcover edition has a red ribbon bookmark attached. Here are a bunch of reviews as well as some nice glancing references in Salon, strategy + business, Economist.com, the Sunday New York Times Book Review in 1999 and 2004,the daily Times in 2009, and Gawker. Turn of the Century appeared on the Newsday, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller lists. Here are a couple of newspaper stories about me from when the book was published — and a decade later here’s Jon Robin Baitz discussing it with Alec Baldwin at Guild Hall in East Hampton.

In 2016 Publishers Weekly called it one of the ten best long novels ever.

I’m also the author or co-author of three humor books. The first was called The Real Thing (Doubleday, 1980; Holt, 1982), amd received nice reviews. It’s a book of very short essays around the idea of quintessentialism. (One of its chapters argued that the puppets Bert and Ernie are the archetypal modern gay couple – a whimsy that eventually led to protests by offended Christians, a short film called Ernest and Bertram, characters in the Tony-winning Broadway hit Avenue Q and endless denials [and a threat of litigation] from the producers of Sesame Street. On the occasion of Sesame Street‘s 40th anniversary, The Wall Street Journal took note.)

The second was Tools of Power (Viking, 1980), a parody of how-to-be-successful books that I wrote with Mark O’Donnell and Roger Parloff. The third was Loose Lips (Simon & Schuster, 1995), an anthology of edited transcripts of unintentionally entertaining conversations among and testimony by actual people, some of them famous. My co-authors were Jamie Malanowski and Lisa Birnbach, who were also my collaborators on an Off-Broadway show of the same name that we created with the director Martin Charnin. (And although they’re not really books, I also contributed during the 1980s to several national parodies — Off the Wall Street Journal, Not New York Post and a mock civil defense pamphlet called Meet Mr. Bomb.)

I wrote introductions to Laughing Matters: A Celebration of American Humor (edited by Gene Shalit, Doubleday, 1987): to Minus Equals Plus, (Harry N. Abrams, 2001), a collection of the work of the artist and illustrator Istvan Banyai; Public Relations and the Press: The Troubled Embrace (Northwestern University Press, 2007); and a new paperback edition of Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Penguin, 2009).

I contributed to The Best American Magazine Writing 2008.

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{ twitter }

I have a new novel called True Believers coming out in July (
http://goo.gl/gWU2f).
I also wrote Heyday and Turn of the Century, and host Studio 360.

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Reviews of “Turn of the Century”

New York Post – May 23, 1999

Writer Does Good Turn

By Peter Pavia

Kurt Andersen’s debut novel, ‘Turn of the Century,’ about a power couple in the year 2000, is caustic, comedic and completely worthwhile.

Kurt Andersen’s debut novel, “Turn of the Century,” is so hip -so “edge,” as one of its TV-executive characters might exclaim – that the present cannot possibly hope to contain it. It’s set in the year 2000.

Our popular culture, bare to its most basic elements – money and celebrity – stands poised over the next century as nimbly as it has closed out this one. Hilarious and arch, caustic and yet in an odd way almost gentle, “Turn of the Century” is the closest thing contemporary literature has to offer as a cocktail party conversational imperative, and a cultural one as well.

Salon
A hyper-sharp satire of business, media and manners….At heart, in fact, this little big novel is not so much an industry satire — though it’s exceptional as that — as it is a sweet, mature love story and, more, a meditation on modern communication and miscommunication….Andersen, who has a great ear for dialogue, has an even better one for flubbed dialogue….What he has created is impressive: a well-imagined picture of an info-teeming, overmediated, very possible near future….

The Philadelphia Inquirer
Andersen is too smart, too funny, too ingenious, too talented, and has written a novel that is just too much fun for other writers to handle….Turn of the Century is more than clever. There is a chilliness that tends to pervade comic novels, especially those written by men (Tom Wolfe, Martin Amis, or their archetype, Evelyn Waugh), a dyspeptic and disdainful eye. Unlike Wolfe…Andersen has true affection for his characters, even the daffy ones. The Mactier children are culturally hot-wired, but they’re dutiful children who love each other and their parents. The couple adore each other. Imagine that…. Rare is the book that makes me laugh out loud. Turn of the Century did constantly. Andersen’s witty apercus and his protean imagination are dazzling.

Seattle Weekly
The thing fairly hums with…irresistible information. In Andersen’s book, the…very funny name dropping goes to work and   comes home having bagged something that looks a lot like meaning. Andersen’s masterstroke as a comic writer, though, is his positioning of his   book five minutes in the future….Andersen has in fact given us a portrait of the way we live now, a portrait scarier and truer than most realist fiction.

SFsite.com (science fiction and fantasy web site)

British review excerpts

The Guardian
An essential modern primer on money, the media and technology…Andersen has captured lightning in a bottle.

Spectator
The seminal novel of this and the next decade.   What Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities did for the Eighties, Andersen’s mega-novel will do for the millennium.

Independent
Captures the zeitgeist, offering no mercy as it romps through the era of roaring Wall Street bulls and Bill Gatesís microsoft imperialism…funny, hip and relentlessly sharp. Andersen is a writer of Wolfeian style and great brio. Demonstrates his ability to explore the emotional complexity and the deep-rooted fears that propel all ambitious folk forward….admire its ambition, its deranged breadth of knowledge, and its high-voltage energy.

Independent on Sunday
Extraordinary… Nicolson Baker on additives…an exceptional book.

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