Current Affairs

by Barbara Raskin

product_description

Genres: Fiction

289 pages, Hardcover

First published August 4, 1990

About the author

Barbara Raskin (1936–1999) was a Washington, DC–based journalist and author best known for her novel Hot Flashes. Capturing the feelings of the generation of women born during the Great Depression as they faced middle age, the novel spent five months on the New York Times bestseller list. Raskin wrote four other novels, Current Affairs, Loose Ends, Out of Order, and The National Anthem, as well as articles for numerous publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. She received a fiction award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Reviews

[EC Lee]

CURRENT AFFAIRS
By Barbara Raskin.
270 pp. New York: Random House.
Review by LINDA WERTHEIMER

Barbara Raskin writes very souped-up, sexy novels about women of a certain age. I loved ''Hot Flashes,'' but ''Current Affairs,'' while it is stylish and slangy, written in a wild and wordy prose that is engaging and catchy, isn't as good. The story writhes through a Washington summer that is even hotter than the weather here in our nation's capital really is, and almost as hot as the plot. Ms. Raskin rewrites the ending of the Iran-contra affair, making it come out the way many old Washington lefties wish it had. She stirs in characters that are crazy composites of people we gossip about, and she hangs the whole thing on a relationship women will recognize as the closest, most vulnerable, most dangerous, most loving one we have: with our sisters.

The novel's narrator is Natalie Karavan Myers. She sees herself as a blurry version of her famous sister, Stephanie (Shay) Karavan: ''I'm the faded sister, the vanilla sibling, the pale comparison.'' Sister Shay is a jet-setting journalist who sleeps around. She is glamorous, wears tight jeans and when drunk claims to have slept with Fidel Castro, Muammar el-Qaddafi and Sean Connery, among other celebrities. Still, she is a serious journalist, her sister says. Although Natalie is jealous of and eternally exasperated by Shay, she says she would not trade places. ''I am a person; she is a personality. I perform; she's a performer. I have character; she is one.'' Early in the summer of 1988 Shay obtains a document that the sisters think might be more important than the Pentagon Papers, a Drug Enforcement Administration interview with Oliver North's secretary, Fawn Hall. Using real Iran-contra names in a racily (but carefully) written account, Ms. Raskin connects contras to drug distribution in Washington. She suggests ''the illegal provision of ill-gotten drug dollars to the contras in defiance of Congress'' without actually saying the stolen document ties the familiar names with the dirty deeds. There is adventure, abandonment and adultery in store for our ''vanilla'' heroine because of this packet of papers.

The sisters sort through several lifetimes of sibling rivalry. ''Shay and I made up the term. We make Joan and Jackie Collins look like the Bobbsey Twins.'' A number of partly familiar people pass by, including a magazine-buying mogul who is blond and Southern and an independently wealthy poet who used to head the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It is all fantastic and pretty good fun, but what I would really like is to see a bootleg draft of ''Current Affairs'' the way it looked before the Random House lawyers read it.

[Julie Barrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Current affairs by Barbara Raskin
Audio book and the sisters start out with numbered lists of why they are jealous of the other, why they are the same and why they are different.
Nat is married and no kids. Shay has had 4 husbands with a grandchild that she pawns off on others. Nat picks her up at the airport and they head to a party but the car is stolen. Real problem is highly sensitive government papers that Shay had are also stolen. Snapshots along the way are described.
The car is found and the cops question Nat as to the papers and she has no clue-they are Shay's. She wants to put her under the bus instead she tends to the little granddaughter so Shay can go track down who wants the papers now...
Lots of action as the FBI helps to protect her and they try to make a deal with the thugs...lots of DRAMA!
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).

[Maureen Flatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revisiting an old favorite……God, I loved this woman…..one of DC's finest.

[Angie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't bother.... I stopped 1/3 of the way in because it's so bad.