Thanks to The Lost and Found Show, I had the opportunity to read at Word Bookstore as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival this year.  Believe me, I was hilarious.  No, really.  I was funny.  But, beyond that, I met the author David Burr Gerrard and his debut novel Short Century. I just finished reading it and it was a blast.  It’s also my kind of book.  Gerrard wanted to delve into the psychology of a former 1960s radical who, by the 1990s, had turned into a vociferous proponent of the use of American military power to make the world a better place.

In the 1960s, Arthur Huntington is a Yale student, a classmate of George W. Bush, and the follower of a Timothy Leary style thought leader who convinces his rapt and horny young audience of devotees that all sex is political and the world can be changed in the bedroom, or on the floor or in a park or wherever. Meanwhile, Hunt dreams of liberating the people of a country in the Middle East known only in the book as “Redacted.”  The dictator there has forbade people from speaking the country’s name and it is surmised by one character that this is because talking about a country in the modern era is the first step towards invasion.

As a war correspondent in the 1990s, under the name Arthur Hunt, he witnesses atrocities in former Yugoslavia that can only be solved by sex, not violent.  Along the course of his life, and before the name change, Arthur also sleeps with his sister.  This happens more than a few times.  So, now you know.  It’s all part of the novel’s manic and fun exploration of both the American WASP aristocracy (now faded) and the young radical impulse to break all taboos (also now faded).  Also along the way, Hunt and his sister indulge a mythic fantasy life focused on the exotic “Redacted” kingdom.

Arthur’s career as a journalist and his position in society turns him into a somewhat influential thought leader who uses his powers to agitate for liberal interventionism in much the style that Christopher Hitchens did.  The novel’s author describes himself as having been persuaded by the hawk case in Iraq and then sorely disappointed by the results.  I know that I was persuaded, back in high school, about the hawkish case for the first Iraq war.  When the focus of our violence is a Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, or the villainous brothers who run “Redacted,” it is very easy to dismiss the anti-war impulse with the reality that “It really couldn’t happen to more deserving targets.”  Short Century is no polemic and though you could read the incest as a kind of painting the worst onto the backgrounds of prominent hawks, it’s really there to bring some melodrama to the story, which creates some distance for the reader and allows some space to consider that Hunt’s arguments for war aren’t all that bad on paper.  On the ground, though, the losses mount and are personal.

Short Century was published in the spring of 2014 and deserves more attention than it’s so far received.  The mythical land of “Redacted” discussed in the book is akin to the mythical caliphate of ISIS/ISIL and here we find ourselves, a decade after the Iraq War debacle, going back to the well of interventionism because the arguments aren’t all that bad on paper.

Where the incest and the punditry really connect, and this drives the point home better than I have ever seen in any blog, is on the point of accountability.  Hunt is a writer, ever able to justify himself.  The novel is, for the most part, presented as his unpublished manuscript.  At one point, he writes in the voice of four other people close to him, including his sister.  He has her say of him:

“Arthur will never truly take responsibility – he will just poke at it and then jerk his hand away, as though it’s a plate that’s too hot.  No one in this restaurant, no one she has ever met, will take responsibility for anything, will truly accept punishment when they’ve earned it, however much they talk about doing so.  Accepting punishment – that would be revolutionary.”

She is talking about their private actions but we have all shaken our fists at the pundits who have been disastrously wrong and who not only never admit it but who return to the page or screen with the same arguments, again and again, hammering away in the hopes of hitting nails by chance.

Consider Short Century as one of your fall reads.  I think this crowd especially will enjoy it.