New City Book

Stephen Amidon's fourth novel The New City is a powerfully plotted American tragedy, mirroring the nation's own optimistic birth and the inevitable betrayal of its idealism. The "new city" of the title is Newton, Maryland; a city built from scratch, planned and developed to provide a perfectly engineered social and physical environment which might foster the dreams of the Republic, a place where races will live harmoniously. Its architect Barnaby Vine believes that "the city's design would provide a remedy for the social chaos gripping the nation...Put [people] in communities and they'll act like human beings". Entrusted with carrying out his vision are two men, one white, one black: Austin Swope, acting city manager and the lawyer responsible for land acquisition, and Earl Wooten, the master builder who has overseen the construction of Newton and who dreams of a city free of racial prejudice. Unexplained problems are developing in the city's social and structural fabric, however, and as Newton starts to fall apart, Swope and Wooten are set against each other by a moment of mistrust. Amidon's plot is inexorable and compelling, the end a brutal descent into chaos and treachery.Amidon's book lies partly within an established American tradition which explores the possibilities of creating utopian communities in the New World, but also picks up on the recent fascination for revisiting the dysfunctions of the 1970s (for example Rick Moody's The Ice Storm) and the turbulent personal and political currents of those times. It also brings to mind the inexorable fall-from-grace plot of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities--but without that book's ebullient satire and heavy irony: Amidon--though he never quite avoids the element of stereotype that seems such a staple of the thriller-genre he has adopted--is too interested in the detail of character and the individual's response to events to want to turn his book into an exemplary fiction. For what happens is tragedy enough, and sufficiently emblematic to suggest the deep fault lines that still traverse American society. --Burhan TufailRead More