David Goodwillie

Just days after unknown terrorists have blown up an office building in New York City, disaffected media and gossip blogger Aidan Cole receives an anonymous tip: a picture of a beautiful young white woman walking away from the scene of the bombing and the message “This is Paige Roderick. She’s the one responsible.” Certain that he can uncover an incredible story, he embarks on a one-man mission to find Paige and discover why a privileged young American would plant a bomb in the offices show more of a private and powerful company with close ties to the oil industry. What he finds will derail his life, subverting everything he ever thought he knew or believed.

Told in turns by both Aidan and Paige, American Subversive looks deeply into the causes and effects of an apathetic and alienated American youth culture. The two main characters are well drawn and believable; they are motivated by ideas and events that we can understand, even if our knee-jerk reaction may be to turn away in disgust or disdain. Even better is Goodwillie's razor-sharp evisceration of the two very different cultures in which Aidan and Paige live. Goodwillie’s fiction debut is a gripping, fast paced thriller that doesn’t flinch in the face of terror. show less

Summary: Aidan Cole is a thirty-something media blogger, spending his days moving through the hipper-than-thou scene of disaffected New Yorkers. The city is slowly returning to normal after a bombing of a downtown office building, when Aidan receives an anonymous e-mail with a picture of a pretty young woman and the message "This is Paige Roderick. She's the one responsible." Aidan knows he should call the police, but instead he sets out to investigate on his own. As he learns more and more, show more it seems like he understands less and less: if the e-mail is real, and not some elaborate hoax, why would this average American woman be involved in acts of terrorism? And what's going to happen to her - and him - if he gets involved?

Review: This book was an intensely slow start for me. I struggled to get to page 60, and at that point, I hated both of the main characters, and still had no clear idea where the plot was going. I have extraordinarily limited patience when it comes to reading about hard-partying hipster urbanites, and I was more than ready to abandon the book if it meant not having to spend any more time with them. I decided to give the book until page 100, and if I still wasn't interested, then I'd give it up as a lost cause. However, when I picked the book up the next night, the plot finally got kick-started, and while I still didn't like the characters much, I was pulled into their story, and I read straight through to the end of the book, barely even moving except to turn pages. I'm still not sure that I even liked the story, exactly, but it sure as hell was crazy-compelling.

Part of the reason that I had a problem connecting with this book was its hyper-realism. I'm normally an escapist reader, and American Subversive is the polar opposite of escapism: it's brutally critical of the modern world, and it demands that its readers wake up and take a good hard look at themselves and at our society, and a lot of what it had to say was almost uncomfortably insightful. However, the brutal criticism was pretty unrelenting. Goodwillie's scathingly critical of the current state of things, and scathingly critical of those who don't try to change the current state of things, but also scathingly critical of the ways in which everyone in this book *does* try to change the current state of things.

It's a book that seems to demand something of its readers, but I'll be damned if I could figure out what exactly that something was, leaving me with a feeling like I'd just sat through a scolding I wasn't sure that I deserved. So, overall, it was an (eventually) compelling read, and an interesting change from my beaten path, but I came out the other side not feeling entirely edified or particularly hopeful. On technical grounds, it's an impressive debut novel, it just didn't work so well for me. 3 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: People who like modern (especially post-9/11) fiction or political thrillers more than I do may have an easier time of this than I did. show less

Paige Roderick's brother dies while serving in Iraq, and this event jars her to such an extent that first she becomes an activist, and then a revolutionary. She joins a small cell that plans Actions, i.e. bombings, which are not intended to kill, but to draw attention to the target, which would be some corporation, and thereby expose its misdeeds, and through that process alone put a stop to them.

Aidan Cole is a thirty-something Manhattanite, living a self-absorbed life, working as a show more blogger who comments on the media and partying the nights away with others of his ilk. He is friends with a rich South American playboy, and he is in the middle of breaking up with his girlfriend, although he does not yet fully realize that. Then, out of the blue, he gets an anonymous e-mail identifying a culprit in a recent terrorist bombing in New York City. Attached to the email is a photograph, showing a young woman, Paige Roderick, as she is crossing the street outside the site of the bombing, the Barney's building. Instead of immediately posting the picture on his blog, he decides to investigate and try to find the woman.

The book then describes how this decision affects Aidan's life. At the beginning of the book, we see that he and Paige are in hiding in separate locations, fugitives from the authorities, and what we are reading has been written by each of them to explain how they got to that point. The book alternates between the writings of each of them, occasionally jumping forward to showing Aidan in hiding.

I found the book very enjoyable and engrossing. The only problem that I have with it was that it occasionally becomes a monologue, with one of the characters speaking at length to describe a history or to state a political viewpoint. I found this technique to be annoying. show less

When I read this book, I was particularly interested in the passages in which Goodwillie wrote about one of his jobs as a sports memorabilia cataloger for an auction house, because I was considering applying for a job as a cataloger for an auction house myself (not in the sports department, I hasten to add). Having read about his amusing experiences as a cataloger, my anxiety was considerably lessened, and I applied for the job. I got it -- and he was right about the ridiculousness of a lot show more of the cataloging process. I realize this narrow-focus review is like the old David Letterman bits where he would ask a dentist on to give a dental-centric review of Marathon Man, or something, but, these parts of the book interested me the most. And, sadly, they made up only a tiny portion of the book. If anyone knows of other books which feature the exciting world of auction cataloging, please share -- I must know about them! show less