The Company You Keep

Praise for
The Company You Keep
by Neil Gordon

Voted one of 2003’s Best Summer Reads by
USA Today

“Rousing, cerebral…. Gordon’s plot is a doozy—a trio of doozies, in fact—yet utterly credible. He projects wrenching political and personal drama onto a slightly futuristic version of where we stand now as a people. In so doing he shows how we got here…. What makes this novel compelling is not only the ideological spectrum it covers but its emotional chiaroscuro…. It bids well to enter the company of our best fiction about the Vietnam era.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“
The Company You Keep
works as a thriller, but the adventures…are grounded firmly in larger political and moral issues, in this case the passionate conviction that the radical opposition in the ’60s to the Vietnam War represented the high point of American idealism, the best dream America ever had…. The characters speak with passion about serious moral issues, and they admit us to the intimate moments of their lives where the political and the personal intersect. The result is a compelling story.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“As compellingly as the best nonfiction accounts of the ’60s and ’70s, Gordon’s novel shows why so many of us took to the streets to fight social injustice and what Martin Luther King Jr. called ‘this immoral, unjust war’…Gordon has intertwined fact and fiction as seamlessly as Don DeLillo did in
Libra
, his ‘factional’ account of Kennedy’s assassination…. [A] precisely written swashbuckler, a serious, sometimes brilliant, always protean tale…lively, energetic.”

—
The Washington Post

“Gripping.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“Neil Gordon’s
The Company You Keep
is an astonishing tour de force, at once an intellectual, emotional and political thriller…. [A]n American novel in which plot, characters and ideas are in perfect balance. By bringing the past alive, Gordon enables us to see more clearly where America stands now.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“Gordon skillfully interweaves the voices of his fictional narrators with many of the most important totems of the era: Vietnam, the shooting of Kent State students by Ohio National Guard members, and the bombing of a townhouse in Greenwich Village…. His characters are so skillfully drawn that they remain likable and interesting, and their missives to Isabel are sincerely felt and compelling reads until the very last page.”

—
The Boston Globe

“[A] hybrid of political novel, love story, cat-and-mouse thriller, and French bedroom farce…entertaining…
The Company You Keep
becomes an addictive page-turner of a book.”

—
Seattle Times

“
The Company You Keep
is an important story that’s at once a compelling yarn and an exhumation of issues the ’60s generation would prefer to dodge…. [It is] close to the bone, an American saga that captures a poignant moment in our history where the war at home was as real—if not as deadly—as the one in Vietnam. Gordon’s story is about a revolution that never really happened, in a time that never really ended.”

—
Times Union
(Albany)

“Gordon…writes with precision and understanding about the political and personal psychodramas that beset the radical left thirty years or so ago…. [He] skillfully weaves an intricate narrative….
The Company You Keep
isn’t a standard historical novel. But it certainly is a novel that tells a history.”

—
The Capital Times
(Madison, Wisconsin)

“Gordon skillfully combines a tense fugitive procedural, full of intriguing lore about false identities and techniques for losing a tail, with nuanced exploration of boomer nostalgia and regret.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Compelling and intricately plotted…. Well-rendered and engaging political drama.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

Neil Gordon was born in South Africa in 1958. He holds a Ph.D. in French literature from Yale University, worked for many years at
The New York Review of Books
, and is currently the literary editor at
The Boston Review
and on the faculty of Eugene Lang College at the New School University. His journalism has appeared in
Tin House, Tricycle
, and
Salon
and he reviews regularly for
The New York Times Book Review
and other periodicals. He is the author of two previous novels,
Sacrifice of Isaac
and
The Gunrunner’s Daughter.

Table of Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

My dearest Izzy,

All parents are bad parents. This is the first thing I want to tell you. All parents are bad parents, and the sooner you understand this, the easier it’s going to be to decide what to do.

I mean, how can we possibly be anything else? Everything we tell you from the day of your birth is such bullshit. We tell you that Mommy and Daddy love each other, that there is a difference between bad and good,
and that everything, always,
is going to be all right. Then you grow up and find that Mommy and Daddy can’t stand each other; that nobody cares if the rich are bad or the poor are good; that most of the world is at war and that everything is in fact looking like it’s going to be coming out all, entirely, completely wrong.

We didn’t tell you about that part. We didn’t tell you that we don’t have the faintest idea where we came from, we don’t have a clue about why we’re here, and as for where we’re going, God knows. Except we don’t know if there is a God.

See? And so we lie, and therefore, are bad parents.

Right? I’m not arguing with you, Isabel. I don’t want you to excuse me, understand me, or sympathize with me. I lied to you, I deceived you about the very fact of who I was, who you were, and then I abandoned you, and all this by the time you were seven. You can’t, I think you have to agree, get much worse than that, parent-wise.

The single point that I want to make, in fact, is that
all
parents are
bad parents. We in fact
decide
, very early on, to lie. And the fact is, we make that decision because the truth would have been worse.

If you think that’s defending myself, fine. You can trash this e-mail and miss your plane, that’s your choice. But in fact—in fact, now, whether you believe it or not—the truth would have been worse.

I mean, what the hell were we supposed to tell you? Think about it.
Hey, darling, you know what? After you go to bed, Mommy and Daddy can hardly sit in the same room without starting to fight, bitter fights, where they say horrible things specifically to hurt each other as deeply as they can. And guess what? Chances are 50–50 that you and some lucky man, one day, are going to make each other just that miserable too.

See what I mean, Isabel? Or how about this:

My dearest girl, bad people are murdering each other horribly from Sierra Leone to Bethlehem, sometimes with machetes, sometimes with guns, and sometimes by torture and starvation. They do it for each other’s money, they do it because they don’t like what each other believes, and in some places—Ireland, Israel, magical lands over the seas—they do it because they just don’t know how to stop.

Then you run off and play with your Legos, right? Right. More likely, after that, you go play with a semiautomatic in a school cafeteria.

Therefore we lie, and we do so because the truth would have been worse.

Isabel. You are all grown up now. Seventeen, and filled with the knowledge of good and evil. I didn’t mean to brutalize you with the truth when you were a baby, and I don’t mean to brutalize you now, either.

I can see you, as you are now, in this spring of 2006. Here in America it is two in the afternoon, the sun distant behind cloud, the field outside my room turning the palest green in the early spring. Where you are, England, it is evening, 7
P.M
., the season already in leaf, the night kind with still, warm air. I imagine you in your dorm room, reading this as you sneak cigarette smoke out the windows—in England, I know, school is still in session, and in England, I know, people still smoke.