Books, Arts & Manners: Buckle Up and Read

The Red President, by Martin Gross (Doubleday, 397 pp., $17.95)

A thriller with a title like The Red President can hardly miss. It doesn’t need Dostoyevskian or even Dickensian characters, Jamesian subtleties, Joycean pyrotechnics, though some reviewers (of whom more later) are already complaining of the absence of such elements, which would only impede the main proceedings. Those who thus carp are guilty of ingratitude for what the title intimates, and Martin Gross delivers: whiplash plotting. If you can put this book down, you could probably doze off in the middle of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

JS

About the Author

Joseph Sobran

Featured Tags

The Red President, by Martin Gross (Doubleday, 397 pp., $17.95)

A thriller with a title like The Red President can hardly miss. It doesn’t need Dostoyevskian or even Dickensian characters, Jamesian subtleties, Joycean pyrotechnics, though some reviewers (of whom more later) are already complaining of the absence of such elements, which would only impede the main proceedings. Those who thus carp are guilty of ingratitude for what the title intimates, and Martin Gross delivers: whiplash plotting. If you can put this book down, you could probably doze off in the middle of The Postman Always Rings Twice.