As far back as the 1960s, novelist Philip Roth declared that reality in the United States was outpacing the creative capacities of the writer of fiction. “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents,” he wrote back then, “and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist.” Some 30 years later, Tom Wolfe endorsed Roth’s lament: “We now live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist lies helpless before what he knows he will read in tomorrow morning’s newspaper,” although that did not keep Wolfe from energetically tackling in fiction again and again what he called “the billion-footed beast” of the contemporary scene.
Neither does it keep Lee Oser, some 30 years after Wolfe’s remark, from doing the same in his latest novel, Old Enemies, subtitled “A Satire.” But things that might have been satirical not that long ago can now seem startlingly and simply real to readers who have lived through the recent years of turmoil and change in America that form both the subject and theme of this amusing but still serious work, a multilayered story combining elements from campus radicalism, curricular demolition, corporate tyranny, and media corruption.
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