Word: andersen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...know Kurt Andersen. Everyone knows Kurt Andersen (especially here at TIME, where he was on staff for six years). I just know him less well than everybody else does, so it falls to me to review Turn of the Century (Random House; 659 pages; $24.95), his novel about the world in which "everyone" can be defined as the people Kurt Andersen knows...
This, if you're wondering, is a compliment. Since his time at TIME, Andersen has been a founding editor of Spy, the editor in chief of New York, a producer of network specials, a staff writer for the New Yorker. He knows the three points of the buzz compass--Manhattan, Hollywood and the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash.--as well as anyone. Or at least as well as anyone who has so keen an appreciation for the pomposities, vapidities and idiocies that constitute the murmur of our times. As his chief characters--a former journalist edging into sleazy television infotainment...
This is one big mama of a book, its very size a hint of its ambition. Put the same characters and story into 250 pages, which Andersen could easily have done, and you'd have an amusing satire; at 659 pages, you're trying to create something Important. There are two problems with this strategy: first, to get it all in, Andersen is forced to spin scenes in which one character sort of asks another, "Tell me about how that works"--whereupon Andersen hijacks the character's voice for an invariably brilliant riff on news anchors or online stock trading...
Worse, you just don't end up with a novel. While he capitalizes handsomely on the freedom afforded by fiction (so many more people you can zing without fear of libel!), Andersen is hamstrung by the overall structure that the genre demands. His sentences may sparkle, but the book's forward motion is a sputtering lope. Its loose, digressive shape makes Turn of the Century awfully easy to put down...
...NAME SPEAKERS INCLUDE...] Kurt Andersen, John Lahr, Susan Orlean, Lillian Ross...