State of the Union

And I don’t mean the speech the US president holds to the nation every year in January. No, State of the Union is Douglas Kennedy’s latest book from last autumn. I picked it up on my out of Heathrow in November last year, but somehow I have never gotten around to reading it until a couple of days ago. Having read some of his other books like A special relationship and The big picture I thought I was in for treat. Both books were real page-turners that I couldn’t put down. But, boy was I wrong. I never really got into State of the Union, no matter how much I read. The book was just plain boring. For a while I was actually very tempted to just quit, but I’m too stubborn and I love to read.

And I’m lazy too so I’m copying the synopsis:

America in the Sixties was an era of radical upheaval – of civil rights protests and anti war marches; of sexual liberation and hallucinogenic drugs. More tellingly, it was a time when you weren’t supposed to trust anyone over the age of thirty; when, if you were young, you rebelled against your parents and their conservative values.

But not Hannah Buchan.

Hannah is a great disappointment to her famous radical father and painter mother. Instead of mounting the barricades and embracing this age of profound social change, she wants nothing more than to marry her doctor boyfriend and raise a family in a small town.

Hannah gets her wish. But once installed as the doctor’s wife in a nowhere corner of Maine, boredom sets in... until an unforeseen moment of personal rebellion changes everything. Especially as Hannah is forced into breaking the law.

For decades, this one transgression in an otherwise faultless life remains buried. But then, in the charged atmosphere of America after 9/11, her secret comes out and her life goes into freefall.

But do recommend you to read A special relationship and The big picture. While reading A special relationship I was so surprised that it was actually a man who had written so intensely about post-natal depression.

Sally Goodchild, a thirty-seven-year-old American journalist, suddenly finds herself pregnant and married to an English foreign correspondent, Tony Hobbs, whom she met while they were both on assignment in Cairo. From the outset Sally's relationship with both Tony and London is an uneasy one - as she finds her husband and his city to be far more foreign than imagined. But her problems soon turn to nightmares when she discovers that everything can be taken down and used against you.

The big picture makes you wonder. Wonder how life would be if you decieded on day to pretending to be someone else.

On the face of it, Ben Bradford is your standard Wall Street hot shot - Junior partner in a legal firm, 6 figure income, wife and two young kids straight out of a Gap catalogue. But along with the WASP lifestyle comes the sting - Ben hates it. He wants - has always wanted - to be a photographer. When he discovers his wife is playing outside the ground, the conseqences of a moment of madness force him to question not just the design of his life but the price of fulfiment. Because finding yourself means nothing when you're pretending to be someone else.