Turn of the Century: A Novel - Softcover

Andersen, Kurt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385335040 ISBN 13: 9780385335041

Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

“A big, sprawling book . . . [Kurt Andersen has] infused it with so much inventive imagination. . . . Should be put in a Manhattan time capsule with the note: ‘This is how we lived at the turn of the century.’ ”—The New York Times Book Review
 
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
 
In his brash, brilliant first novel, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen casts a penetrating eye on our giddy, media-obsessed era. With a keen sense of irony and a storyteller’s grace, he weaves a tale that is at once a biting satire and a wickedly incisive portrait of marriage, family, love, and friendship.
 
The millennium is here. BarbieWorld has opened in Las Vegas. Charles Manson’s parole hearing is on live TV. And George and Lizzie are a Manhattan power couple with three kids in private school and take-out from Hiroshima Boy waiting at the door. Lizzie owns a software start-up. George is a TV producer. With cell phones tickling their thighs and gossip buzzing in their ears, their future couldn’t be brighter. Until, that is, Lizzie cuts a deal with George’s boss and gets an office twenty-one floors above her husband’s. Until all the glitter and the hype threaten to destroy George’s and Lizzie’s sanity and their marriage. Until the only thing that can save them is a little understanding—at a time when everyone is talking but no one hears a thing.
 
“Savagely subversive . . . a smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“Inspired . . . astonishing . . . very funny.”—Entertainment Weekly  
 
“A big, Tom Wolfe–ish New York comic novel . . . on the last breath of the century.”—Elle

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century, among other books. He writes for television, film, and the stage, contributes to Vanity Fair, and hosts the public radio program Studio 360. He has previously been a columnist for New York, The New Yorker, and Time, editor in chief of New York, and co-founder of Spy. He lives in Brooklyn.

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um is here.  BarbieWorld has opened in Vegas. Charles Manson's parole hearing is on live TV.  And George and Lizzie are a Manhattan power couple with three kids in private school and take-out from Hiroshima Boy waiting at the door.  Lizzie owns a software start-up.  George is a TV producer.  With cell phones tickling their thighs and gossip buzzing in their ears, their future couldn't be brighter.  Until, that is, Lizzie cuts a deal with George's boss and gets an office twenty-one floors above her husband's...  Until all the glitter and the hype threaten to destroy George's and Lizzie's sanity and their marriage...  Until the only thing that can save them is a little understanding--at a time when everyone is talking but no one can hear a thing.

In his brash, brilliant first novel, media insider Kurt Andersen casts a penetrating eye on our giddy, media-obsessed era.  With a keen sense of irony and a s

Aus dem Klappentext

The millennium is here. BarbieWorld has opened in Vegas. Charles Manson's parole hearing is on live TV. And George and Lizzie are a Manhattan power couple with three kids in private school and take-out from Hiroshima Boy waiting at the door. Lizzie owns a software start-up. George is a TV producer. With cell phones tickling their thighs and gossip buzzing in their ears, their future couldn't be brighter. Until, that is, Lizzie cuts a deal with George's boss and gets an office twenty-one floors above her husband's... Until all the glitter and the hype threaten to destroy George's and Lizzie's sanity and their marriage... Until the only thing that can save them is a little understanding--at a time when everyone is talking but no one can hear a thing.
In his brash, brilliant first novel, media insider Kurt Andersen casts a penetrating eye on our giddy, media-obsessed era. With a keen sense of irony and a storyteller's grace, the co-founder of "Spy magazine weaves a tale that is at once a biting satire of America in the near future and a wickedly incisive portrait of marriage, family, love, and friendship. A crackling, cybercharged joyride through our millennium, "Turn of the Century is pure, eye-popping entertainment.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

February-March 1

He has just left an early breakfast meeting--very early--with three men he's never met before. He's never heard of the men, in fact, and he planned to blow off breakfast until his partner told him he should go, because the men are important and potentially useful. He trusts his partner, who used to work for their agency. They are agents, all three of the men at breakfast, but agents who made it very clear that they prefer never to be called agents. He is already confusing and forgetting their names, even though the men's main purpose in coming to town, they strongly suggested, was to meet him and tell him they would love to be in business with him. That's the phrase these people always use: "We would love to be in business with you," said in a breathy, solemn, confidential way that makes it sound profound and salacious. He is walking up the Avenue of the Americas, just south of Forty-seventh Street, now thinking of almost nothing but the morning sunlight pouring over from the right, making the line of proud, gray, dumb, boxy giants on the left--Smith Barney, Time-Life, McGraw-Hill, News Corporation--prettier than they deserve to be.

A pair of mounted police walking past him, about to make the turn onto Forty-seventh Street, snags his attention for an instant, the very instant a signal reaches the tiny device wedged in his left inside jacket pocket. It is forty-two minutes and forty seconds past eight on the twenty-eighth of February.

Between his right thumb and forefinger he grips a huge paper coffee cup, and, with the other three fingers, the handle of his briefcase. As the device's programmed sequence proceeds, there is no noise, not even a click, only a tiny, continuous, hysterical vibration. In the first quarter second, the muscles in his chest tense and his left nipple goes erect. He takes a short, sharp, surprised breath and, without thinking, flings the coffee toward the gutter, then grabs at his left pocket with his right hand. But already the first instant of dumb panic has congealed to dread--two seconds--as he claws to find the device, to punch the button, to shut the thing down before the sound--three seconds . . . four seconds--before it is too late.

It is too late.
"Hey, man," says the young man kneeling and looking up at George Mactier. His eyebrows, George sees, are sculpted into what look like Morse code dots and dashes, each eyebrow a different letter. "What the fuck you, man, you fucking clumsy dick, man! Shit."

The messenger's electronic signature-slate clipboard and his Day-Glo green nylon satchel of envelopes are drenched now in steaming ultra-venti latte, skim milk, extra shot of espresso. His helmet--a glossy magenta with built-in radio mouthpiece, like a fighter pilot's--has been knocked off the handlebars and into the street by George's briefcase. The helmet is now skittering up Sixth like a pinball between the tires of an accelerating Harlem-bound M5--one of the dozen new, clear, vodka-bottle-shaped Absolut Transit buses the city has been given for Christmas. The two men each survey the wreckage. If only the restaurant's espresso machine hadn't been broken, George knows, he wouldn't have stopped at Starbucks; if the espresso machine at the Millennium hadn't been broken and he hadn't stopped at Starbucks, this poor groovy schmo wouldn't despise him, and the chasm between the races and the classes and the generations wouldn't now gape a nanometer wider. Perhaps it was the fluttering of a satyrid's wings in Bhutan that had roiled into a breeze in the South China Sea that blew across the Pacific and became a thunderstorm last week in Oakland, and that delayed the shipment of an espresso-machine valve to the Millennium.

"Maybe the helmet, maybe you can--"
"Maybe I can what, man? My boss is gonna motherfucking criticize my ass so bad, man," the messenger says, looking up at George. "You know that? He's Soviet, man!"
"I'm really--oh, jeez, look at your pants, too. I'm sorry." George leans in to help him up, but then remembers the kid hasn't been knocked down. He was kneeling when George flung the coffee, fiddling with his bike, and so instead, George just quickly touches his sweaty green-and-pink-spandexed shoulder and says again, "Sorry."

"The thing was brand-new, like three hundred dollars, I think. Man." They stare together across the street at the bashed, cracked pink helmet still wobbling crazily. (Stenciled on its side in big teal letters is a phrase George reads as !mom !69. A rap group? A brand of heroin? A lifestyle choice?)
"The coffee cup sort of like . . . collapsed." Sort of.

The silent, five-second-long vibrating alert on the tiny device in George's pocket has given way to the up-and-down do-re-mi-fa-mi-re-do chromatic tweet of the audible alert. His wife, Lizzie, has said it sounds like reveille for pixies, and his stepdaughter, Sarah, has asked him if he cares if it makes strangers think he is gay. But George has stuck with the little tune rather than any standard beeeeeep choice, because it subverts the display of self-importance, he hopes, of getting a cell-phone call on the sidewalk, in an elevator, at a restaurant table. It has finally become possible, for about three years now, to carry on a phone conversation walking down the street and not look like an asshole. It's still not possible in a restaurant, he and Lizzie agree. Yet is consistently looking like an asshole really any different from being an asshole? This they are less sure about.

"My phone," George says to the messenger with a lame, bashful smile. He nods toward the silly electronic noise deedle-de-deeing from his chest and starts to move away. "Sorry." Shrug, step. "Sorry." Five paces later, crucially beyond the latte blast radius, freed again to be just another pedestrian, George puts his briefcase on the sidewalk and finally pulls out the phone.

"Hello?"
"George? Honey--"
"Yeah?" He hears nothing. "Lizzie?" Nothing. "Hello?" He punches end. He will wait for her to call back. Holding the phone a foot from his face, he leans against the sandstone of Rockefeller Center, the real Rockefeller Center, staring distractedly through the mists of his own winter breath at new Rockefeller Center, the stolid late-fifties and early-sixties addendum across the avenue. The sunlight has diffused now. But the buildings still look strangely, unaccountably handsome. Have they been steam-cleaned? Is it the new outdoor sculpture (Torqued Mousetrap with Logo, three blocks long, by Richard Serra) that Disney installed on the sidewalk? Or is it because Lizzie announced this morning as he said goodbye and she spat out toothpaste that she is desperate for him to fuck her? Where has his contempt gone? Then he realizes: the skyscrapers that looked atrocious in 1980 and 1990 now, in 2000, look quaint, elegant, swingy. He isn't aware of having revised his opinion; his opinion has been changed for him, updated automatically, gradually, by sensibility osmosis, leeching from glossy magazines and newspaper style sections into George's brain. First Frank Sinatra, cocktails, Palm Springs, rayon garments, plastic furniture, and all kinds of Cold War bibelots were resuscitated, even the words VIP and chick--and now, as of this morning, these buildings, which George has spent a few seconds every week of his adulthood loathing actively, are looking kind of cool. He doesn't know whether to feel pathetic or liberated by the insight.

The phone jiggles.
"Yeeeesss?" he says joshingly.
"Oh, George."
"What is it?"
"Your mother died last night."
"Ohhhhh . . ." He feels like he's been shot in the face at close range. With blanks, but it's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385335040
• ISBN 13: 9780385335041
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 672
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar