The Critical Response

 

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (Mona Simpson): “Richard Kluger’s vast and accomplished third novel…is about a young man’s coming of age in the 1930’s.  Throughout that decade, the book’s intelligent, brave, well-educated, and not particularly handsome protagonist Toby Ronan struggles with large, fundamental questions about his life….  In its refusal to reduce experience to ideas, Un-American Activities is an ambitious and profoundly American novel.”

 

LOS ANGELES TIMES (Elaine Kendall): “The book has an authentic 1930s feel, supplied by the author’s total recall of the idiom, costume and props of the period.  Like the early novels of John Dos Passos and Thomas Wolfe, Un-American Activities is substantial, earnest, and nourishing.  Reading it leaves one with a definite sense of time spent upon a worthwhile project.  Though the novel of ideas is an endangered species, Kluger has given it a reprieve.”

 

CHICAGO TRIBUNE (Richard J. Walton): “Un-American Activities is not only wonderful but wonderfully long…..  It is one o those books you just sink into, secure in the knowledge that the end is far distant.  You read it faster and faster because you’re so caught up in it, and then when finally you approach the end, slowly and even more slowly.  You don’t want it to end….  What I did not expect was wit instead of sobriety, a novel with all the intensity, enthusiasm, and vulnerability of a first novel, even though Kluger is well into middle age.  How rare and wonderful to find a novel with the spirit of youth and the wisdom of experience….”

 

THE NATION (Victor Navasky): “Most underrated novel of the year…an unsentimental, nonideological (and ultrareadable) journey through the popular front….  The most American of novels, containing, among other joys, a startling portrait of the old conservations corps.”