Media Meets Mayhem: The TFT Review of American Subversive by David Goodwillie

American Subversive, journalist/memoirist David Goodwillie’s debut novel, blends the best of the political thriller genre with the nuance and the observational prowess of literary fiction. The result is a tense, harrowing read that is at once a profound commentary on undercurrents of emptiness and desperation running through contemporary American lives-both in public and private spheres-and an entertaining page turner that’s tempting to devour in one sitting. Set in the aftermath of a harrowing bomb attack on Manhattan in-scarily-2010, the novel shows the evolution of Goodwillie’s talents of portraying the emptiness of glamour and the powerlessness we feel in the face of disturbing world events through a keen, observant eye.

The dual protagonist-narrators are a jaded journalism student-turned-celebrity blogger, Aidan Cole, and Paige Roderick, an idealist with a political bent who turned to radicalism in the wake of her older brother Bobby’s death in Iraq. (He was a soldier.) Aidan blogs for Roorback.com (“a roorback is a ‘defamatory falsehood published for political effect’”), an arm of Derrick Franklin’s blogging empire-a loosely disguised stand-in for Nick Denton and his new media network of Gawker et al.   One night while at his ex-girlfriend’s party, Aidan ducks into the bedroom to check his email and finds a mysterious message from EmpiresFall@gmail, an image of a beautiful woman crossing Madison Avenue in a hurry: “This is Paige Roderick. She’s the one responsible.”

What the sender is accusing Paige Roderick of is the devastating event that is the book’s raison d’etre: a bomb was detonated in Midtown Manhattan four days before we meet Aidan at his New York Times writer ex-girlfriend’s party, and the city is in a state of anxiety and paranoia.  Though Aidan is tempted to dismiss the email as the work of another publicist seeking to promote something or someone on Roorback, the link to the bombing is too strange to be ignored, and thus serves as catalyst for launches the plot’s central mysteries: who is Paige Roderick, who is behind sending this message, and why send it, of all places, to a gossip blog? With the aid of appropriately Venezuelan secondary character Julian Touché, Aidan sets out in search of answers. The quest leads Aidan on a journey that spans far beyond his the Manhattan media universe he’s feeling blasé about at the novel’s outset.

Alternating chapters present Paige’s perspective, too, which adds richness and texture the work might lack were we limited to Aidan’s version of events.  Paige is a character who brings to mind Merry, the teenage radical of Philip Roth’s similarly titled American Pastoral: Merry bombs a post office to protest the Vietnam War.

Paige is still reeling from her brother’s death when she meets Keith Sutter, the ringleader of a group of modern-day Weathermen-style domestic activists who resort to terrorist tactics, and she is pulled into his plot. It would be easy to make a stock character of Paige, woman whose troubled past leads her to a group of domestic terrorists but in Goodwillie’s hands she is rounded and human, with a distinct voice of her own that’s alive on the page.

Goodwillie builds and maintains the necessary level of tension for a thriller, and the pages practically turn themselves.  Yet there are none of the pitfalls often inherent in genre writing-Goodwillie’s characters are well-developed, intelligent, and prone to reflective interiority-and the masterful plotting, brisk-paced action, and clear, relatable character arcs give American Subversive an edge over your typical political thriller.  Its love story subplot, too, heightens tension and the characters’ vulnerability.

The narrative is punctuated by touches of ominously prescient humor: “Sure there’d been a groundswell of hope surrounding Obama’s election a few years back, visions of a fresh start and all that, but hope always ended badly in America, or at least got bogged down in Congress.” And The New York Times runs a Carrie Bradshaw-esque dating column.

Goodwillie’s vision is precise and consistent, as both works address the difficulty of change, the prevalence of familiar patterns.  His first book, the memoir Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, lays the groundwork for some of the themes in American Subversive, though the memoir addresses life and ambition in a very different New York, a New York that has since disappeared-the New York of the 1990s.  In American Subversive, he seems to build a bridge from his former experiences: “A decade had passed in the back of countless cabs, a fancy dinners and midnight pizzerias; the drug dipping and surprisingly functional alcoholism that consumed our nights and destroyed our mornings; nothing stimulating, nothing surprising, our thirties spreading out before us like our twenties, but with the lessons still unlearned. We were a tough lot to teach. We only listened to ourselves.” And when that no longer haunts us, we should be prepared for Goodwillie’s American Subversive to become eerily prophetic.