SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Real Thing

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Heyday

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This historical novel may surprise readers who know Kurt Andersen as the cofounder of Spy magazine and the author of the wise and acerbic Turn of the Century (1999). It's set in the mid–19th century, for one thing, and not—at least not ostensibly—about media or celebrity. Benjamin Knowles is a young Englishman infatuated with all things American, including and especially the part-time actress/part-time prostitute Polly Lucking, whom he meets on his first passage to New York. Just as Knowles and Polly are about to go public with their love, Knowles does that boy-thing—i.e., says something stupid—and she flees New York. (continues)

It's worth getting through the slowish beginning to arrive at the delightful, intelligent last two-thirds of this long novel when Knowles teams up with Polly's damaged brother, Duff, and family friend, Timothy Scaggs, a journalist of sorts, in a trek west in search of the freethinking Ms. Lucking, with a murderer just behind them (it's a subplot). Andersen's second novel is more than just a love story or a history lesson (though there are details included that make it clear how much research Andersen did); it's a true novel of ideas. The group visits a 19th-century health farm/cult, for example. The occasional historical figure—e.g., Charles Darwin—makes an appearance as well. There are shades of T.C. Boyle's The Road to Wellville, as well as aspirations toward E.L. Doctorow. But in the end, this second novel belongs to Andersen, a tale of bright, rambunctious, aspiring young people. Like them, the book is rowdy, knowing—and wholly American.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Kurt Andersen is best known for his previous novel (the irreverent, postmillennial Turn of the Century), his role as cofounder and editor of the now-defunct Spy magazine, and as host of public radio's Studio 360. Heyday, Andersen's second novel, recalls the work of Gore Vidal, T. C. Boyle, Thomas Mallon, and even Charles Dickens. Critics agree that while the author's vision is grand and his execution ambitious, Knowles's adventures too often get bogged down in the minutiae of the period at the expense of storytelling (Janet Maslin deems the effect "compulsive pedantry"). Fans of books that set forth Big Ideas (Heyday very much differs from Turn of the Century) will revel along with Andersen, who clearly enjoys what he's doing here as he celebrates the tumultuous energy and the careless optimism of an America on the move.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
In 1848, young English aristocrat Benjamin Knowles, inspired by the regime change he witnessed in France, immigrates to America in search of "vulgarity and strangeness," enlightened attitudes, and democracy in action. He finds them all in Manhattan's infamous Bowery district. Ben falls in immediately with three misfits: Timothy Skaggs, alcoholic journalist and photographer; Duff Lucking, troubled firefighter and arsonist; and Duff's sister, Polly, actress and part-time hooker. Ben's tumultuous affair with Polly--and the promise of greater freedom--drives the group's journey westward, where California's gold fields await; meanwhile, a crazed French official crosses the ocean to take revenge against Ben. Andersen's satirical wit is well evident, but he plays fair, offering scenarios to offend nearly everyone. In the tradition of the old-fashioned epic, Heyday presents amazing coincidences, lengthy digressions, and myriad descriptions of mores and vices. Although the amount of irrelevant historical detail overwhelms the plot, this overstuffed parody of a Victorian novel makes some serious points: it succeeds in exposing the peculiarities and ridiculousness of nineteenth-century society--and contemporary reverence for it.
-- Sarah Johnson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Library Journal
"In this utterly engaging novel, the author of Turn of the Century brings 19th-century America vividly to life . . . While this is a long book, it moves quickly, with historical detail that's involving but never a drag on the action; the characters are beautifully drawn. A terrific book; highly recommended."

From Vanity Fair
"Heyday is fuled by manic energy, fanatical research, and a wicked sense of humor.... It's a joyful, wild gallop through a joyful, wild time to be an American."
 

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Spy

From Publishers Weekly
With equal parts nostalgia and snarkiness, this history /anthology celebrates the now legendary satirical magazine during its heyday—aka 1986 to 1991, when founders and partners Andersen (Turn of the Century and host of [PRI's] Studio 360) and Carter (editor of Vanity Fair) ran the show (the magazine folded as a monthly in 1994). "We were very lucky to catch two waves—the post-'60s ironic mood and the go-go financial mood," observes Andersen, and these pages offer plenty of opportunity to travel back to those heady days of "Separated at Birth?" and "The Spy Guide to Postmodern Everything." Those who wondered what life at Spy was really like will also be rewarded: former deputy editor Kalogerakis [...] has collected plenty of stories about minuscule paychecks, ridiculously tight budgets and bacchanalian parties (Andersen and Carter chime in with extensive annotations). Certain to be on the holiday wish lists of aging hipsters.
-- Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

"Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. . . it was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed . . ."
-- Dave Eggers

"It's a piece of garbage."
-- Donald Trump

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Turn of the Century

From the Wall Street Journal
Can a book destined for every beach blanket and nightstand in the Hamptons really be any good? Can a novel that refers to Prada, Ferragamo and Manolo Blahnik be admitted (without at least a period of quarantine) into the nation of literature? And can anyone really have the temerity to believe that American culture at the turn of the century isn't beyond parody? The answer to all these questions appears to be yes, judging by the evidence of Kurt Andersen's elegant and relentless fictional sendup of the way we live now.

The plot defies easy synopsis (there's a reason this novel is 659 pages) but revolves around a delicious conceit…. It's a savagely subversive notion…. Mere synopsis….doesn't begin to convey the pleasures of this smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age. The overwhelming wackiness of public life in this country would seem to render satire gratuitous, yet a few novelists remain unintimidated. Tom Wolfe, Martin Amis and Scott Spencer, to name just three, have cut our media-besotted social fabric to ribbons in their fiction, and now Mr. Andersen has stepped up to shred the whole mess into a fine, powdery dust. ("Turn of the Century" invites comparison to "Bonfire of the Vanities," but Mr. Andersen writes with more finesse….) Despite the plague of falseness, people in his book still love and strive and grope for meaning, just as they do in life….."Turn of the Century" offers a thoroughly affecting portrait of a marriage….

I would be hard-pressed to name a novel that does a better job than this one of conveying what it's like to run a business, particularly a modern-day company in which everyone comes to an office and does things on computers. The author's way with such episodes is matched by his wickedly keen observations about almost everything else…  

Of course, literary fiction isn't supposed to be about this kind of thing -- about money and power, status and lust, computer security and urban design, as well as love and envy. Mr. Andersen knows this. At one point, when Lizzie and George are getting creamed in the newspapers and their marriage is disintegrating, they meet for a function at their son's school. After tepid greetings, "She gives a minimal one-shouldered shrug, lighting her Marlboro and squinting down the street toward the bright disk of sun behind the clouds. In her twenties, Lizzie gave up reading short stories. Right now she remembers why. They all felt just like this moment." Mr. Andersen shows that, at the turn of the century or any other time, there is much more to life than that.

From Michael Wolff, New York Magazine
The coolest of ironists….Mesmerizing….the Evelyn Waugh of the media class Newsday A convincing portrayal of the rhythms and stresses of a high-powered, two-career marriage…..His eye for cultural detail and social nuance is impressive….This is an artfully plotted and often very funny novel.

From Dan Cryer, Newsday
...a sly and scintillating novel about how we live now. It's an expansive, wide-angled satire in the Tom Wolfe manner, though more sharply attuned to contemporary technology and pop culture.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer
Andersen is too smart, too funny, too ingenious, too talented, and haswritten 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.

From the 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.

From The New York Times Book Review, Po Bronson
...Kurt Andersen jacks you into the nerve center of the media society and pins your eyelids open until you go nearly blind with overload.

From The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
It's a little as if Leopold and Molly Bloom had been slimmed down, hyped up, tuned in and given a year instead of a day to exist. Fortunately, most of the digressions are informative, wickedly satirical or outrageously funny and often all at once.... Andersen has written the most uncliched novel imaginable.

From 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.

From 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.

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
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 hucksterism, the 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 reality-oriented 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.