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Turn of the Century: A Novel, by Kurt Andersen
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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.
- Sales Rank: #2968981 in Books
- Published on: 1999-05-04
- Released on: 1999-05-04
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.40" h x 6.51" w x 9.60" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 659 pages
Amazon.com Review
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
From Publishers Weekly
A blockbuster fiction debut for media insider Anderson (formerly editor-in-chief of New York magazine, co-founder of Spy), this brilliantly conceived, keenly incisive social satire draws fresh humor out of the overhyped territory of millennial madness. Beginning his myopically futuristic novel on February 28, 2000, Anderson employs a future-present tense in which he mischievously tweaks current attitudes regarding marriage, friendship, the mass media, Wall Street and the computer industry, just to name a handful of his numerous targets. With ferocious energy, he also captures the essence of New York, Las Vegas, L.A. (its permanent sunniness, annoying and even slightly scary after a while, like a clowns painted-on-smile) and Seattle (... like a gawky guy with a great body whos bald and stammers and wears dorky clothes). These are not new topics for mockery, but Andersons eye is fresh and his irony carries a potent sting. George Mactier, executive producer of a controversial TV series called NARCS, and his wife, Lizzie Zimbalist, owner of a computer software company, serve as Andersons 21st-century poster couple. They are self-conscious enough to recognize the embedded ironies in their fast-paced, high-profile lifestyle (Lizzie voted reluctantly for Giuliani twice, but spent election day giving a five-dollar bill to anyone who happened to ask for money, as penance). Their already troubled marriage is being vaporized by the hysterical pace of their respective professional lives. The couple have three cyber-precocious children (Lizzie e-mails her sons bedroom from the kitchen to announce dinner), as well as a host of eccentric friends (Ben Gould is a multimillionaire investor whose latest venture is a Vegas theme park called BarbieWorld) and colleagues (Harold Mose, the egomaniacal owner of the MBC Network, becomes both George and Lizzies boss). The convoluted plot boldly defies summary, but it ultimately achieves a mad convergence highlighted by an intricate, hilarious plan to manipulate Microsofts stock by virtually killing Bill Gates. Anderson employs a biting topical humor that is always exaggerated, yet seldom actually seems inconceivable (the cover story in Teen Nation, an offshoot of the Nation magazine, is headlined: Jimmy Smits and Jennifer Lopez in Mexico: This Revolution Will Be Televised). Cell phones and computers are ubiquitous, but the vaunted Information Age is illusory at best. The characters are constantly thrown off kilter by disinformation, missed information and miscommunication. Yet while the tone is hyperbolic and beyond the cutting edge, the core issues are curiously old-fashioned: love, ethics, friendship, even happiness. Anderson brilliantly sustains the comic pace throughout the lengthy narrative, though his ultimate message may be disappointing to millennial idealists: The future aint what it used to be. Major ad/promo; first serial to the New Yorker; BOMC selection; author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
It's the year 2000, and millennial hype continues. Successful television producer George Mactier and his wife, Lizzie Zimbalist, owner of a software design firm that's being courted by Microsoft, are living in style in New York City, with limos, private schools, and vacations in the Caribbean. But life at the turn of the century is not all easy money. George's new show has too strong a tendency to blur the line between fiction and reality for his media mogul boss, Mose, who keeps calling Lizzie for consultations. While the tension between George's and Lizzie's careers and their marriage is interesting, the high point of the book is the amazing and amusing catalog of references to modern culture. Andersen, former editor of New York magazine and cofounder of Spy, inserts real people, places, and events into a barrage of images that includes Bill Gates, L.A., the NASDAQ, interspecies organ transplants, and the Beanie Baby craze, making the Eighties seem peaceful by comparison. Recommended for all fiction collections.
-ADevon C. Thomas, Highland Twp. Lib., MI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
A Postmodern Trollope
By Rachel Cohen
This is one of those books that buzzes in your head for weeks after you've read it. "Turn of the Century" is loaded with dazzling riffs and observations about contemporary life, of course, but the people in it are equally memorable and sharply drawn. You really start to see folks you know in light of characters from Andersen's novel. ("Oh, he's a sort of Timothy Featherstone type," I found myself saying of an acquaintance.) The satire -- of the worlds of media and entertainment -- is unsparing, and yet the book has surprising warmth. Andersen has pulled off something remarkable here: a 21st-century version of Trollope's "The Way We Live Now." It's really true: the novel is stippled with present-day counterparts of Augustus Melmotte, Sir Felix Carbury, and the rest of Trollope's immortal cast. As with Trollope, Andersen's essential humanity infuses the book with a sense of worldly compassion. (Tom Wolfe seems tinny and shrill by comparison.) "Turn of the Century" is a novel that will make you laugh out loud, without feeling bad about it later. I can't remember when I've had a better time with a novel, or learned so much along the way.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
At Arm's Length, with the Occasional Chuckle
By Jon Fain
Anderson has done some admirable heavy lifting to present a just-in-time, high concept, bullet train of mild satire and cleverness. It takes awhile get used to and wade through the topical references to events, people, places, and things, both real and vividly imagined, that five years from now will make this novel seem like it was written in a dead language. Readers seem to have widely differing opinions about whether the characters are compelling,it's funny, etc. If you don't have any interest and affinity for the Fast Company/Hollywood/Web culture you'll hate it. I'm familiar enough with the worlds of the novel (at the grunt level anyway) to get the jokes and admire the imagination. But if you want a book that deals deeper with whether we lose our "soul" and connection to others by what we do for work, try JR, by William Gaddis (an author whose movie rights Anderson's character Ben Gould buys up in one of his "charitable" schemes). Overall, Turn of the Century is a too-long, although often amusing piece that relies so heavily on a reader's existing knowledge of the scene that I found myself holding the characters at arm's length. I prefer being a little more intimate.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Starts Out Great, Soon Turns Tedious
By A Customer
I don't know why this novel had to be 659 pages! Starts out with a bang. Loved how the author drew me into the techno/media word with the cool jargon, like Doug Coupland's GENERATION X, but unlike GEN X, this book was waaaaay too long and all the hip-slick-cool language grew tiresome and the characters grating. I didn't feel for Lizzie or George and their gimme-gimme lives and by the end---yes I read the whole damn thing, brought it to the beach with me and had no other reading material---secretly hoped that George's plane was going to crash en route to Mexico! Wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have alot of time to waste...life's too short!
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