Liberty Campaign

By Jonathan Dee

Book Overview

Combining finely tuned suspense with provocative insights into the nature of good and evil, The Liberty Campaign is a novel of stunning psychological depth and power.

Gene Trowbridge, a sixty-five-year-old successful advertising executive, fills the days before his retirement assessing his past and considering the future. A deliberate and thoughtful man, Gene lives a solid, peaceful existence with his wife in a genteel Long Island suburb, watching on television the failure of his son Jack's professional baseball career and increasingly aware of his own displacement in a field dominated by the very young. But a chance meeting with Albert Ferdinand, a reclusive neighbor who wins his regard and friendship, upsets the tenuous balance of Gene's world. From the scandal that comes to surround Ferdinand, Gene is brought face to face with the unimaginable depths of cruelty that lie well beyond his complacent suburban community. Spurred on by a persistent journalist and overwhelmed by self-doubt stemming from his instinctive liking and acceptance of a man of potentially indescribable evil, Gene is drawn into a suspenseful search for the truth about Ferdinand's past. In The Liberty Campaign, critically acclaimed author Jonathan Dee has created one of the wisest and most memorable voices in recent fiction. When Gene is ultimately presented with a stark ethical choice and forced to reevaluate his judgment and his principles, Dee captures, with extraordinary precision and power, the vulnerable time in the life of an aging man when he falters, not sure that his own life experience has provided him with the ability to act. The Liberty Campaign is a riveting, multilayered portrait of an ordinary man whose moral universe is tested by a situation that defies the parameters of his decidedly American upbringing and sensibility.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671890859
• ISBN13: 9780671890858
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Advertising, Baseball, and War Criminals

"The Liberty Campaign" a very introspection-heavy novel, focusing on the thoughts of a soon-to-be-65 marketing executive. It is a deeply nuanced novel, and though it has more thought than action I found it easy and enjoyable to read. The main character is forced to reconsider his life when faced with his looming retirement, his son's waning career as a professional baseball player, and the discovery that his long time neighbor may or may not be a former Brazilian war criminal in hiding. Though the last item in that list might seem a little shocking it actually gets about the same page count as the other two topics, which, balanced against the whole of the protagonists life is highly appropriate. The very fact that in the suburbs people can sit around and inactively contemplate a neighbor's alleged war crimes is one of the revelations the narrator sits around and inactively contemplates. The book asks and doesn't quite answer a lot of questions about our ability to know evil and judge others, about the what it is that make someone's life successful, and about the nature of repenting and forgiveness. Frankly, it's hard to list out questions like this without them seeming trite, but that's why you need a well-written novel to dance around the issues in a new and profound way if you want to really understand them.

a must for advertising people

an excellent book. sad, funny, always interesting. just enough elements of cinema to draw a reader in, seduce them into thinking they're getting nothing more than a well-written drama--which it is, only with depths that movies don't bother to ever aspire to find. the subtle, sad undertones floating throughout the story make this book a humane but dark book. i wish all adpeople would read it and recoil at how shallow most of our lives are.

Graceful and Thought-Provoking

Dee's book has a moral weight that you rarely see in American fiction, but the writing is not at all heavy-handed. An excellent accomplishment.

Well-written story of our thin veil of humanity.

Main plot: retiring professional meets reclusive neighbor who turns out to be a wanted man. Good piece of fiction that develops the characters well. Characters become well known and the main character guides the reader to an understanding of how little it really takes to get us out of our little civilized shells into a bigger, scarier world beyond the US borders and beyond our sense of humanity. The initial smoothness of the reading makes the transition to deeper thoughts all that more involving and tedious.