Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

As big and exciting as the next century, this is a novel of real life at our giddy, feverish, topsy-turvy edge of the millennium. Turn of the Century is a good old-fashioned novel about the day after tomorrow--an uproarious, exquisitely observed panorama of our world as the twentieth century morphs into the twenty-first, transforming family, marriage, and friendship and propelled by the supercharged global businesses and new technologies that make everyone's lives shake and spin a little faster.
        
As the year 2000 progresses, George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist, ten years married, are caught up in the whirl of their centrifugally accelerating lives. George is a TV producer for the upstart network MBC, launching a truly and weirdly groundbreaking new show that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Lizzie is a software entrepreneur dealing with the breakneck pleasures and pains of running her own company in an industry where the rules are rewritten daily. Rocketing between Los An-geles and Seattle, with occasional stopovers at home in Manhattan for tag-team parenting of their three children, George and Lizzie are the kind of businesspeople who, growing up in the sixties and seventies, never dreamed they would end up in business. They're too busy to spend the money that's rolling in, and too smart not to feel ambivalent about their crazed, high-gloss existences, but nothing seems to slow the roller-coaster momentum of their inter-secting lives and careers.
        
However, after Lizzie, recovering from a Microsoft deal gone awry, becomes a confidante and adviser to George's boss, billionaire media mogul Harold Mose, the couple discovers that no amount of sophisticated spin can obscure basic envy, greed, suspicion, sexual temptation--and, maybe, love. When they and their children are finally drawn into a thrilling, high-tech corporate hoax that sends Wall Street reeling (and makes one person very, very rich), George and Lizzie can only marvel at life's oversized surprises and hold on for dear life.
        
Like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century lays bare the follies of our age with laser-beam precision, creating memorable characters and dissecting the ways we think, speak, and navigate this new era of extreme capitalism and mind-boggling technology. Entertaining, imaginative, knowing, and wise, Turn of the Century is a richly plotted comedy of manners about the way we live now.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literature, Novels

659 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels Turn of the Century, Heyday, and True Believers, and and, with Alec Baldwin of You Can't Spell America Without Me. His non-fiction books include Fantasyland, Reset and The Real Thing.

He is also host of the Peabody Award-winning weekly public radio program Studio 360,.

Previously, Kurt was a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine Spy, editor-in-chief of New York magazine, a columnist for New York, staff writer at The New Yorker, and design and architecture critic for Time.

Reviews

[Julie Waldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could not put it down - brought me back to the Y2k hysteria, the up and down of the .com and the excitement of a new millennium - loved the characters.

Warning - its really long!

[Al · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book gets a lot of comparison to Tom Wolfe and and his Bonfire of the Vanities. It's been a few years since I read Bonfire, but I really liked it, and am a big fan of Wolfe. Turn... got some good recommendations and user reviews on Amazon peg it as a book that people either love or hate (a good sign, I think). It purports to do what Bonfire does except for the internet generation.

I don't want to turn anyway from this book, but it just wasn't for me. On the positive side, Andersen is a pretty readable writer. I thought about giving up halfway through, but decided to stick it out. His writing is compelling, but there just isn't much there. There doesn't seem to be any action in the is almost 700 page book (probably twice the size it needs to be) until the last 100 pages or so (and then, it seems too contrived).

The characters are developed well enough, but the reader is never sure whether they should love them or hate them. They are generally not sympathetic enough to love; nor, despite that they are written as "rich people with problems", they are not particularly worthy of our resentment either. Is the book satire? Is it slice of life? I was never sure.

The book, now a decade old, may have lost its spark in that it is Andersen's mediation on where media is going, and in ten years of outrageous reality tv, we are almost there. Though a book that is trying to be edgy may not always age well, Turn doesn't sound any different in 2009 than it probably did in 1999 (the occasional references to vcr's and celebrity guest Phil Spector excepted). This is where the book works. It strives to be Bug Jack Barron without the sci-fi stuff.

Andersen tries to capture the present atmosphere (and near future) of media, technology, and finance. The media stuff is great, and Andersen will throw out some ideas that you could just picture Fox pitching for next season. The technology stuff is okay. It still reads up-to-date, although in 2009, some of the discussion on things like "hacking" aren't as exciting as maybe they were intended. The finance stuff is probably actually given more gravitas after the recent Financial Market shake-up.

A lot of promise here, and it is Andersen's first novel. Some may like it, but I may hold off on his work for awhile.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Personally, I enjoyed this one a good bit, but I'm only giving it three stars. That's because I can't see it being particularly accessible to anyone who has never lived in New York and worked in either media, technology, or possibly finance.

The software-company boardroom scenes, and the depictions of i-bank trading (while eerily pertinent given the events in the financial services industry earlier this month) sometimes got flat-out, instruction-manual boring, but the rest of "Turn of the Century" drew me in enough to sit through them.

One more nitpick: the subplot involving the anti-Microsoft hackers is integrated rather sloppily. I would've rather seen this having a stronger bearing on the two protagonists earlier on. I realize that the point is that thanks to New York media's ongoing butterfly effect they were indirectly responsible for the Fark-like antics, but I would've liked to see this as more of a running subplot than an "oh wait!" that pops up in the last quarter of the book.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turn of the Century was a much better read after the actual turn of the century, when I read it again a week ago. It was released in 1999, it's set in 2000/2001, and a dozen years later so much rings true. Only he didn't really "get" the potential of the internet back then. It's not as prescient as Super Sad Love Story, but in parts at least as entertaining, in a very grown-up way, sincere. Great scenes involving the development and production of a TV news show, and a Silicon Alley upstart. I was hooked again, and followed it with a Heyday re-read, and discovered that the set of characters is very similar. The eccentric Timothy in both books, the "modern" marriage/relationship, lots of NYC of course... can't wait for Trust Me, just renamed True Believers, which will come out in July 2012.

[Kelly Mayo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing on two levels. Not only does it weave a dense but masterful story juggling scores of characters and subplots and an arsenal of Chekov's guns; it also features some shockingly accurate predictions for the way we live twenty years after the book was published, not in a gee-whiz-flying-cars way, but in a "Fahrenheit 451" way. The misadventures of these high-powered characters show what happens when your eyes are on the future but your head is up your ass. A definite read, especially for Tom Wolfe fans and Y2K nostalgics!

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate to give up on a book but I could not finish this one. After reading almost 200 pages, I still did not find it interesting and did not get involved with the characters. It seemed dated after only 13 years.

[Les · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely entertaining. Its a bit long, but the story never gets old or stale. I do think that it would be a far less interesting read today for anyone under the age of 40, maybe 50.

[Chris Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is a time capsule from the days just before 9/11, when day trading in the stock market was a revered form of capitalism, the media moguls still had their game, and the world wide web was a research tool instead of the influential policymaker that it is today. Some of its lines demonstrate how modern politics and our friends' echo chambers have squashed free thinking, a change I am hoping will reverse itself in time.

This is the second time I've read Turn of the Century and 17-18 years later, I again found it too dense and dark in tone to be a pleasurable read, though I'm pretty sure I understood more of the relationship struggles and the parenting challenges better than I did as a bachelor when the book came out. I'm glad to restore this tome to its place on the shelf, and look forward to pulling it again in 2040, when perhaps I will have mellowed a bit more.

[Morgen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Social satire of Y2K yuppie-dom, particularly the computer and television industries. Not my milieu, so it's hard to tell how much is satirical and how much is real. Amusing, depressing,and very,very wordy. He's making $16,675 a week as producer of a new network's cop show; she owns a small firm Micro-soft is interested in. Their fortunes turn down, then up again.

[Jericho · Rating 3 out of 5]

A kind of Y2K version of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities without that book's streak of cynicism. Entertainingly dense and hilariously dated in terms of pop culture references (AOL, Charles Manson, Beanie Babies, Bill Gates, etc), it's a long-winded foray into a very specific time and place that ultimately works best as a curious societal artifact.

[JMcDade · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just didn't care about the characters. Couldn't finish it. I kept hanging on thinking that it might engage me and that there might be some nuggets of interest since I lived through that time. I ready a little more than half of it -- and it just didn't resonate.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely enjoyable read that I couldn´t put down. I loved the story, I was absolutely and densely inmersed in the year 2000 again, and I loved the characters that were not too shallow.
An absolutely surprising discovery! Loved it and am already prepared to read the next one!

[Dkolacinski · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just couldn't relate to a two-income family who made more money in a month than my wife and I made in a decade!

[Christopher G. Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those big, noisy, throbbing with energy New York City novels.
Hi-tech personalities. Midlife crises. Lost inside the corporate world where Bill Gates can't be bothered to pick up the phone. An examination of the shallow world of BarbieWorld as a metaphor for the manufactured man and woman.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been meaning to read this since it was published....in 1999. Sad. And I wish I had read it earlier as it's definitely a bit dated now (It's always tough to read a pre-2001 book that is set in New York City. However it's amusing to see the things that Andersen predicted that now exist, and don't), but it's still a great book, in the great-American-novel-of-the-moment category, like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. It's looooong, though, so be prepared and the ending is a little too happily-ever-after to be taken seriously.

Oh, and Warren? Great guy. And favorite line(s), "Howard Moorehead obviously considers himself professorial, but to Lizzie he looks like the sad, pompous senior man behind the formalwear counter at Bergdorf Goodman. Lizzie tries hard not to judge books by their covers, but she never hesitates to judge the covers."

[MJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really did enjoy this book. His writing style is clean and snarky, and his characters are vividly drawn. He really captures the feel of the city at the time. As the book was published in 1999, the story is set in the near future, and on so many things he was eerily prescient. But unfortunately real-world events overtook the book, and every casual mention of the World Trade Center just grabbed at my heart. Perhaps that's unfair, but now, 11 years after the year 2000, despite all the details he got right, it all just strikes me as a little ... quaint.

[Gobasso · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had very extreme reactions to this book. I loved the way the author skewered the norms of our present day society. I had a terrible time empathizing with the characters and almost stopped reading the book because of their lack of appeal. It is unfortunate that this book about 2001 was written before 2001 and the 9/11 events. In hind sight it suffers from some triviality because of the changes experienced after that day. I think I will try another title by this author but I can't recommend this as a book worth reading.

[Tim Basuino · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really should get a 3.5, or if there were a 10 star system, 7 stars. I was pondering as to whether to assign three or four stars, eventually settling on four, because:

1) In spite of it being a 1999 timepiece, it translated well to 2014.
2) It didn't pretend to have any heroes, a constant irritation of mine with various bestsellers.
3) It seemed a particularly adequate representation of the media, both then and now.

While some compared this to "Bonfire Of The Vanities" (Which I'd give five stars), we need not kid ourselves - "Turn Of The Century" is many rungs below that.

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A personal reaction - not a review: I couldn't really relate to the central characters (rich, successful, married with children New York entertainmnet and IT professionals). So although the book was nicely unpretentious, and mostly entertaining and amusing, I wouldn't have finished it if I'd not had time to kill. Oh, and as a side benefit it does do a good job of illustrating the insanity of the stock markets and their effect on the behviour of publicly listed corporations.

[Siobheann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Achingly clever and funny. Set in the early 2000's - if you have every worked for a big corporation or pllayed buzz word bingo in a boring meeting...you will love this. Very clever. Very LA. Some big words I didn't know. Not an easy read, but VERY enjoyable!!

If you read Hello, like gadgets, movies, name dropping - give this a go.

I bought it in a second hand book shop in York. The reviews on the back are impressive and I can see why.

[cheeseblab · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this when it was more or less new and found it guffawingly funny. Same again, though I'd forgotten how painfully sad it also is, as we watch the ideal couple whom we love dearly fall prey to suspicion and envy and drift toward a seemingly inevitable breakup.

Also the source of a catchphrase I've used for the past decade-plus: "Is that a good thing or a bad thing, Daddy?"

[Michelle Lasley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andersen's take on the turn into the 21st century was poignant and fantastically hillarious. He criticizes modern trends in child rearing, dot-com boom and bust, mobile phone craze and dedication. Although it was lengthy, the pace was quick, and never missed a beat.

[Bret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Consistently hilarious. It seems like, reading it today, this book should be dated, since it takes place ten years ago and is full of old buzzwords about the internet/digital media/etc, but all in all is well written enough to avoid dragging throughout it's rather extensive length.

[Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clever writing style - especially in the way he uses cultural references. You get the sense that he knows the two worlds his main characters inhabit (Broadcast TV and Computer Gaming) very well. The Characters a pretty generic though and the story a little flat.

[Cj · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll admit to not finishing this book. After reading more than 200 pages of this dense tome I put it down. It was going nowhere. It was filling with characters that I didn't care and who grew more and more outrageous as the book went on. It's nicely written, but plodding.

[MaryAnn · Rating 2 out of 5]

got thru it, but I felt like it took forever. (It was a month actually) Almost like there wasn't really a story, just situations occurring. However, I read it 13 years after the fact, so perhaps some of the impact got lost because I have lived so far past the time being written about.

[Sallie Gouverneur · Rating 4 out of 5]

audacious, funny, cleverly structured and written, after all,with a good heart under all that cynicism and shrewd observation

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Splendid novel of the dot-com/new-media boom/bust.

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not exactly compelling, can't put down reading, but worth it for the occasional gem of an observation or just right, turn of phrase.

[VeganMedusa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unfortunately, this is the kind of book that's very of its time (the year 2000). Fortunately, to an old codger like me, the year 2000 was just last week.