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Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen
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Reviews of Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen
Amazon.com
Everyone will compare Kurt Andersen's scathingly funny first novel to
Tom Wolfe's fictional debut, The
Bonfire of the Vanities. Like Wolfe,
Andersen is a merry terrorist, a status-attuned assassin with liquid
nitrogen in his veins, a prose style with the cool purr of an Uzi, and
the
entire society in his crosshairs. And like the Man in White's protagonist,
Sherman McCoy, Andersen's George Mactier is a master of the
contemporary universe--not just Manhattan, but decadent post
fin-de-siècle Hollywood, the globe-gobbling, infotainment-tainted
news
media, and cyberspace from Seattle to Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley.
Turn of the Century opens in February 2000, in a bizarro world with
just a tangy twist of futuristic extrapolation. George has parlayed a
Newsweek writing job into a PBS documentary into a $16,575-a-week
job as a producer at the sinister MBC network. His series, NARCS, is a
veritable Cuisinart of fact and fiction in which the actors get to participate
in real drug busts and get all the best lines, since they're working from
scripts. In the most notorious episode, the dealer they arrest turns out
to
be an Actors Equity member (thanks to Rent), so he gets union scale and
a recurring role.
As George stumbles into a Wolfesque calamity spiral, his wife, Lizzie
Zimbalist, ascends to power. Lizzie is a brilliant software entrepreneur:
her "force-feedback technology" alternative-history game can sense
players' fear. "If you travel to 1792 Paris, for instance, you are
designated a besotted peasant or a frightened aristocrat or an angry
sansculotte according to your heart rate, blood pressure, and skin
conductance; too many twitches, the wrong sort of palpitation, and you're
a marquess (or marchioness) headed for the guillotine." Needless to say,
her insights into the year 2000 earn her bigtime interest from George's
boss and Microsoft. Lizzie is a character at least as vivid as George,
and
their hectic family life is uncloying and acutely observed.
Andersen's plot (involving Bill Gates's potential death) has more hairy
turns than the Hana Highway--read carefully or you'll go off the road.
But
you're guaranteed a wild ride with amazing characters: an irreverent
investor inspired by James Cramer, a hilarious MBC toady, Timothy
Featherstone--who's as marvelous a creation as Tony Curtis in The
Sweet Smell of Success--and worlds' worth of social caricatures. Kurt
Andersen has an uncanny ear for the way we talk now and Turn of the
Century is sharp, knowing, and subversive. Let's all pray that it isn't
prescient as well. --Tim Appelo
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The New York Times Book Review, Po Bronson
In Turn of the Century, Kurt Andersen jacks you into the nerve center
of the media society and pins your eyelids open until you go nearly blind
with overload.
Entertainment Weekly, Benjamin Svetkey
...an astonishing doorstop of a debut that deconstructs the 1990s by
peering just over the border into the next decade.... the first most
promising novelist of the Third Millennium.
Time, Daniel Okrent
...it is ... a joy to watch him at work, ricocheting off everything putrid
and
tinny in our culture. Whatever you call the thing after postmodern, Turn
of the Century is it--something post-postmodern, a commentary on
commentary. That may not make much of a novel, but it sure is fun to
read.
Publishers Weekly
Andersen brilliantly sustains the comic pace throughout the lengthy
narrative, though his ultimate message may be disappointing to millennial
idealists: The future ain't what it used to be.
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From Booklist , April 1, 1999
Random House is putting a considerable publicity push behind this novel
by a New Yorker writer, and such a stir will, of course, generate requests
at the circulation desk. But let librarians be honest in telling readers
what
they are getting: a novel as bloated as contemporary marketing, which is
what it is about. But, then, at least it can be said that Andersen's
treatment correlates well with his subject matter. The time is, as one
could guess from the title, the year 2000. George and Lizzie are a
married couple living in New York; he is a television producer, and she,
a
computer software executive. The dilemmas, personal and professional,
that George and Lizzie confront and cope with--and which threaten to
overwhelm them--during the course of the year all reflect, in big, bold
ways, how most of us lead our lives these days: at the mercy of too much
technology, too much information, and too much time spent on
meaningless tasks. Andersen is right in satirizing the manners, morals,
and
mores of the country as we end a millennium, but there is just too much
talk and too much detail about media and computers and entertainment to
give this novel a good flow. Still, Andersen certainly has caught the
drumbeat of our times, and despite his prolix style, he catches us as we
truly are in our attempt to make the best of the society we have wrought.
Brad Hooper
Copyright© 1999, American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews , April 12, 1999
If you're not computer-literate and don't read People magazine, you may
miss some of the jokes, but will nevertheless probably enjoy this
gargantuan (Tom) Wolfeian satire on millennial hucksterismthe first novel
from a well-known New Yorker nonfiction writer. It's the story of a
high-powered Manhattan post-yuppie couple's mutual and separate rises
and falls during the watershed year 2000. He is George MacTier, the TV
producer who hit it big with the virtual realityoriented series NARCS
(whose coup episode featured the real arrest of a genuine drug dealer),
and is currently developing Real Time, a news show engineered to
connect the outside world with its audience's personal lives (network
execs having decided that ``politics is death among the under-50s''). She
is Lizzie Zimbalist, whose thriving computer software company has
attracted the interest of Microsoft, which is attempting a buyout. The
(increasingly byzantine) details of Lizzie's and George's struggles to
stay
ahead of the sharks (and not step on each other's feet) in the
high-pressure new century are juxtaposed against a generous bonanza of
comic near-future concepts and particulars. Lizzie's father becomes a
candidate for the first ``inter-species transplantation'' (he's to receive
a
pig's liver). Health-conscious smokers prefer ``American Spirit organic
cigarettes,'' and kiddies munch on ``Endangered Animal Crackers.''
George Stephanopoulos hosts his own show. Michael Milken has
become ``the richest and most respected criminal in America,'' and
Charles Manson's parole hearings are broadcast live. The gags keep
coming as Andersen's preposterous plot lurches into dizzying overdrive,
bringing Lizzie and George into regretful conflict, and ending with a neat
surprise: a bizarre underwater accident seems to have altered Microsoft's
plans . . . it's too good to give away. If Terry Southern had lived to
see
(or even imagine) the coming century, this is the novel he might have
concocted. It's enormously overlong, and neither Al Gore nor Bill Gates
will approve. The rest of us, however, will be, as they say, richly
entertained. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved.
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Book Description of Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen
As big and exciting as the next century, this is a novel of real life at
our
giddy, feverish, topsy-turvy edge of the millennium. Turn of the Century
is a good old-fashioned novel about the day after tomorrow--an
uproarious, exquisitely observed panorama of our world as the twentieth
century morphs into the twenty-first, transforming family, marriage, and
friendship and propelled by the supercharged global businesses and new
technologies that make everyone's lives shake and spin a little faster.
As the year 2000 progresses, George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist, ten
years married, are caught up in the whirl of their centrifugally accelerating
lives. George is a TV producer for the upstart network MBC, launching a
truly and weirdly groundbreaking new show that blurs the line between
fact and fiction. Lizzie is a software entrepreneur dealing with the
breakneck pleasures and pains of running her own company in an
industry where the rules are rewritten daily. Rocketing between Los
An-geles and Seattle, with occasional stopovers at home in Manhattan
for tag-team parenting of their three children, George and Lizzie are the
kind of businesspeople who, growing up in the sixties and seventies,
never dreamed they would end up in business. They're too busy to spend
the money that's rolling in, and too smart not to feel ambivalent about
their crazed, high-gloss existences, but nothing seems to slow the
roller-coaster momentum of their inter-secting lives and careers.
However, after Lizzie, recovering from a Microsoft deal gone awry,
becomes a confidante and adviser to George's boss, billionaire media
mogul Harold Mose, the couple discovers that no amount of
sophisticated spin can obscure basic instincts: envy, greed, suspicion,
sexual temptation--and, maybe, love. When they and their children are
finally drawn into a thrilling, high-tech corporate hoax that sends Wall
Street reeling (and makes one person very, very rich), George and Lizzie
can only marvel at life's oversized surprises and hold on for dear life.
Like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, Kurt Andersen's Turn of the
Century lays bare the follies of our age with laser-beam precision,
creating memorable characters and dissecting the ways we think, speak,
and navigate this new era of extreme capitalism and mind-boggling
technology. Entertaining, imaginative, knowing, and wise, Turn of the
Century is a richly plotted comedy of manners about the way we live
now
Synopsis of Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen
A big, fresh, energetic, hyperrealistic, up-to-the-second comedy of
manners set in Manhattan in 2000, "Turn of the Century" depicts
marriage, family, friendship, and business as they are conducted at the
giddy, anxious end of the millennium.
About the Author of Turn of the Century. Kurt Andersen
Kurt Andersen is a columnist for The New Yorker. He was co-founder
and editor of Spy magazine, and editor in chief of New York magazine.
At Time, he was an award-winning writer on crime and politics, and for
eight years the magazine's architecture and design critic. He has also
created and produced several network television programs, and
co-wrote Loose Lips, a satirical stage revue that has had productions in
New York and Los Angeles. Turn of the Century is his first novel.
Andersen lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.
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The publisher, Random House, Inc. , May 6, 1999
A Q&A with Kurt Anderson
1) What gave you the impetus to write the book?
It seems to me we're living in a time of "extreme capitalism," where the
marketplace rules as never before. We're living in a time when almost
everything (news, politics, advertising, the computer revolution) is a
form
of entertainment. And we're obviously living in a time when the culture
generally, thanks to technology and the aging of the baby boomers and
the end of the Cold War and feminism and a hundred other reasons, is in
a state of thrilling, terrifying flux and newness. All those seemed rich,
ripe
terrains on which to stake out a big, realistic, funny, social novel. I
hadn't
seen contemporary business or a certain kind of modern marriage drawn
very knowingly or interestingly in fiction, and I thought I might be able
to
do an entertaining job of it.
2) Set in the not so distant future, Turn of the Century has many futuristic
inventions and events -- such as computer games that incorporate
biofeedback, minty-flavored Prozac for kids, civil war in Mexico. What
new developments from the book do you think we'll actually see?
Of the three "inventions" you mention, one--the mint-flavored Prozac for
children---actually exists. I am thrilled that reviewers and reporters
(you're not the first) assume some of the actual things in the book are
fictional, and vice-versa. I think practically everything in the book could
come to pass, and may. In fact, some of my inventions in earlier drafts
did come to pass before I was finished, and I edited them out.
3) As a writer for The New Yorker and Time magazine, editor in chief of
New York magazine, and co-creator of Spy magazine, you've been
writing and editing for years, but this is your first novel. How does writing
fiction compare to nonfiction?
After 20 years of adhering scrupulously to facts, fiction-writing was
discombobulating at first--I felt giddy, like gravity had changed, or as
if I
were committing adultery. In the end, I find writing fiction (and a
659-page book, as opposed to a 1000 or 10,000 word magazine piece)
both vastly more difficult and more fun than writing non-fiction. But
without those years of writing and editing week after week, I wouldn't
have had the confidence in my craft to attempt a novel--nor, I don't think,
the experiences worth transmuting into fiction.
4) What research did you do to be able to so realistically depict the
business lives of your characters who work in television, the computer
industry (both software executives and hackers), Wall Street ...?
I have some professional experience in television and online, but only
some, so as I was beginning the book I spent weeks doing research in
Seattle and Los Angeles and on Wall Street, hanging around with friends
in the software and TV and financial businesses as they did they jobs,
and
asking lots and lots of stupid questions.
5) Where did you grow up? Your young children could live to see the
turn of the next century -- How do you think their experience and their
adult lives will differ from yours?
I grew up in Omaha. And the distinct possibility that my daughters will
live in the 22nd century is a fact I regularly astonish myself with. I
can't
pretend to have any idea what that world will be like. Well, I can
pretend--in fact, at one point, this novel had an epilogue set on New
Year's Eve 2099, with two of the three children in the book reminiscing
about their lives and the 21st century. I do have a hunch that a hundred
and two hundred years from now, the current epoch--1960-2010,
say--will look pivotal.
6) Real people mingle with fictional characters in your novel. Does
anyone in the book have a real-life counterpart (if you can tell us) and
are
you concerned about whether people will see themselves, rightly or
wrongly, as the models for your characters?
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In general, I am not one for doctrines, but I did begin this book with
a
doctrine about reality and invention--that is, I endeavored either to
concoct wholly fictional people (and places and companies and TV
shows and movies and inventions), or to use real people (and places and
companies and TV shows and movies and inventions) as themselves. This
is not a roman a clef, thinly veiled or otherwise. That said, I will confess
that my good friend Jim Cramer, the financial writer and stock trader,
bears a certain strong genetic resemblance to the character Ben Gould.
7) Turn of the Century highlights the cultural differences between New
York, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Do you think these and other American
places will come to resemble each other more in the faster-paced, more
technologically-driven future, or will they maintain their distinct
characters?
I think they will maintain their distinct characters, even as they become,
in
places, more alike. I think it's places like Omaha and Minneapolis and
Houston and Atlanta that are more quickly becoming more alike--as well
as more like NewYork, Seattle, and Los Angeles. And I think
Washington (D.C., not State) is as close to irrelevant to the national
life
as it has been in this century.
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