The New City
Stephen Amidon
Doubleday hbk, 445 pgs, £15.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
The new city in the title of Stephen Amidon’s latest is the portentously named Newton, Maryland, a purpose-built example of grand-scale social engineering by the visionary but ageing Barnaby Vine. The grand design doesn’t even calculate for that many police officers because Newton is not the sort of place that breeds discontent. With its carefully designed housing, man-made lake and a slightly spooky aura of enforced placidity, EarthWorks hopes that America in 1973 is already glimpsing its bright and shining future.
But social engineering requires more than just architects’ plans and a sense of civic responsibility. If only the people moving into the paradisical Newton were easily defined as the bricks and mortar that make up their new homes.
People like Austin Swope, in charge throughout and now a shoo-in for the biggest job of all - city manager. Or his dearest friend, the black builder Earl Wooton. Their teenage sons - Teddy and Joel - couldn’t be tighter. Black and white and rainbow colours can all find a home here. Even John Truax, a Vietnam vet with a gamy hand, can see happiness just over the horizon. Except for John Truax it’s harder to grasp - he’s about to lose his job. And his daughter, the beautiful but dense Susan, is already seeing Joel, much to the disgust of Truax’s German wife, Irma.
And now, as we dig below the surface, more and more of the Newton edifice starts to crack. The exceptionally bright but emotionally stunted Teddy turns his ire on Susan for driving a wedge between the friends, as confident in his intelligence as he is unconsciously confused by his own burgeoning sexuality. And now rumours are circulating that Chicago is secretly grooming Earl and not Austin for top dog. And all the while the fish specially imported for the lake are fetching up dead. Beneath the calm exterior petty jealousies, misunderstandings and even racism are being to boil.
Amidon’s well written 400-page plus epic is never quite as good as it threatens to be. There’s a freewheeling ease to the first two-thirds that, unfortunately, gives way to just too much plotting. The result is that Amidon keeps the majority of the action for the last hundred or so pages, throwing in murder and despair in a hasty macramé of loose-ends. The initial character detail is just too good to give way easily as Amidon strives for a doomed poetry at the close. As a consequence the book is up-ended and disappointment follows. It’s a shame, because for the most part this literary page-turner offers - and delivers - far more literary thrills than its obvious comparison, Kurt Andersen’s pompously self-congratulatory Turn of The Century.