A Desperate Man

by Claes G. Ryn

A HIGHLY ACCLAIMED, RIVETING DRAMA A HAUNTING PICTURE OF AMERICA Could two people be more enviable than Richard and Helen Bittenberg? They love each other, have two healthy, intelligent children, and are financially comfortable. Richard is at the top of his profession. They live in a desirable neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the capital of the most powerful nation in the world with its culturally rich and cosmopolitan atmosphere. Yet Richard is distraught. It seems to him that perverse, irresponsible forces are destroying the country he loves. Troubled by his powerlessness, he seizes a daunting, wholly unexpected opportunity to act. He is drawn into tense, sometimes harrowing circumstances that tax his conscience, courage, and endurance to the utmost. Helen worries about his increasingly stressed condition, but she does not know its real cause. Suddenly, she finds herself in the middle of a nightmare of her own. Helen and Richard must independently handle grueling ordeals, one involving secret political machinations, one involving an agonizing police investigation. The narrative keeps tightening its grip on the reader. The milieus of the novel are Washington, D.C., Paris and environs, and Charleston, South Carolina. Though intensely suspenseful, this is no ordinary thriller. An absorbing moral drama with an epic dimension, it forms a trenchant, thought-provoking commentary on the state of America and the Western world. This novel has received very high praise. It has been compared to the fiction of George Santayana, Thomas Mann, and Gore Vidal, as well as to Whittaker Chambers's autobiographical classic, Witness. CLAES G. RYN was born and raised in Sweden but has lived in Washington, D.C., for most of his adult life. He is Professor of Politics and former chairman of his department at the Catholic University of America and is the author of a number of scholarly books. He has taught also at Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, and Louisiana State University. His teaching and writing focus on ethics and politics, politics and culture, and the history of Western political thought. A frequent visitor to China, he gave the Distinguished Foreign Scholar Lectures at Beijing University in 2000 and is Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University.

672 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2013

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Desperate Man, by Claes Ryn, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, is a political novel that can be divided into two parts.

In Part A, Professor Richard Bittenberg mysteriously disappears during a family vacation in Paris. His wife, Helen, conducts a frantic search, involving both the Paris police and the U.S. Embassy, to find out what has happened to him. Part A essentially comes into play every other chapter of the novel.

Part B of A Desperate Man recounts Richard Bittenberg’s upbringing in Charleston, S.C., his education at The Citadel, the University of South Carolina, and Harvard, his distinguished career as a professor of intellectual history, and his decision to involve himself in a conspiracy to assassinate the president and vice president of the United States and substitute for them a Speaker of the House of Representatives (constitutionally the third in presidential succession) who is friendly toward the conspirators’ point of view.

The conspirators’ point of view is the foundation of this novel. Essentially the conspirators--scores of highly placed Washington movers and shakers across all fields--believe the United States is a corrupted, failing nation on the way down...fast.

Their complaints are as follows: pointless, tragic wars; mounting national indebtedness; inordinate Wall Street influence; and a general belief that the United States’s moral and cultural integrity has been trashed and abused.

This is not a Tea Party indictment in the sense that cutting back taxes and shrinking government would fix the mess in Washington. It is a broader indictment, classically conservative, which holds that America’s conspicuous consumption, reckless profiteering, and disregard for civic virtue and national traditions have put the country on the precipice of total disaster.

As the novel unfolds, Helen Bittenberg has no idea how desperate her husband Richard has become or how deeply he has involved himself in the conspiracy. She doesn’t know anything about the conspiracy; all she knows is that one day in Paris, Richard disappeared.

Richard, by contrast, knows everything about what’s going on in his life. He is steaming with rage at the ruination of the country he loves, and he is regarded by his co-conspirators as smart if something of an egghead. But he’s a dutiful member of the group, very impressed with its originators and leaders (men and women from the Federal Reserve, State Department, National Security Agency, Congress, the CIA and so forth.)

I don’t want to go too far down the narrative path and spoil A Desperate Man for its future readers, but I do want to highlight a few of the troubling questions it raises.

First, this novel focuses on killing the president and vice president, but “in real life,” we have recently seen the extent to which a recalcitrant Congress can thwart the Executive Branch short of assassination.

Second, A Dangerous Man repeatedly advances the thesis that the decline of a nation is socio-cultural in origin. In other words, Hollywood, Wall Street, the universities, the churches, the Internet, and many other socio-cultural forces and actors ultimately will determine our fate more than Congress and the Executive Branch.

This foregrounds some issues that seldom get attention in the media and national dialogue. What happens to a nation where the citizenry loses touch with core values like prudence, modesty, decency, neighborliness, and maintaining a good reputation? What happens to a nation where media violence and street violence are genuinely epic in character? What happens to a nation where a sense of entitlement lures middle-class couples into thinking they should have a really nice house as their first house--3,000 square feet, five bedrooms, family room, flat screens everywhere? What happens to a nation where the gap between wage earners and executives widens and widens and widens? What happens to a nation that doesn’t fight wars as a people but fights them on the basis of professional volunteers? What happens to a nation where the Congress can’t be bothered to exercise its constitutional right and obligation to declare war, but rather leaves that to the Executive Branch? Finally, what happens to a nation where the citizenry more or less just looks after itself, family by family, and lets the Big Boys run roughshod as they please?

These questions underpin the news even if they don’t show up in the headlines very often. That’s where novels come in, dwelling on the dark side of social decay.

Decay is a word that shows up repeatedly in A Desperate Man. It implies that once upon a time we were morally better, sounder of judgment, more cautious in action. That’s a debatable proposition, but it’s worth debating. Short of a senior level Washington conspiracy aimed at the president and vice president, most of what A Dangerous Man relies upon by way of national critique is well-documented. There’s cause for alarm and cause for discussion that goes beyond Republicans and Democrats posturing for political advantage on Capitol Hill and up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. A Dangerous Man pushes that alarm and discussion ahead in interesting and useful directions.

For more of my comments on contemporary writing and issues, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).

[The American Conservative]

In the first few pages of Claes Ryn’s political suspense novel, A Desperate Man, we are privy to the thoughts of one of its main characters, Helen Bittenberg: “This was going to be the perfect vacation … there would not even be any temporary aggravations or uncertainties. … How delightful it was and would continue to be for all of them.”

Read the full review, "Making Do With What We've Got," on our website:

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