The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

An intimate, suspenseful, and provocative portrait of friendship and love at its limits, and a timely exploration of class tensions and corporate excess in America
 
When Eli first meets Sam Westergard, he is dazzled by his new friend’s charisma, energy, and determined passion. Both graduate students in New York City, the two young men bond over their idealism, their love of poetry, and their commitment to socialism, both in theory and practice—this last taking the form of an organized protest against Soline, a giant energy company that has speculated away the jobs and savings of thousands. As an Occupy-like group begins to coalesce around him, Eli realizes that some of his fellow intellectuals are more deeply—and dangerously—devoted to the cause than others. One such true believer is Alex, Eli’s ex-girlfriend and eventually Sam’s lover, who pushes the group toward a more “active” posture, complicating Sam and Eli’s friendship as well as Eli’s relationship with his fiancé Jen, a musician who is more and more skeptical of the group’s radicalism. When Sam and Eli begin to pursue the ex-CEO of Soline personally, what was once a mere academic debate becomes violently real.
 
A fiercely intelligent, wonderfully human illustration of friendship, empathy, and suspicion in the midst of political upheaval, Ryan McIlvain’s new novel confirms him as one of the most talented and distinctive writers at work today.  

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Ryan McIlvain’s debut novel, Elders, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize in 2013. His other work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Rumpus, Post Road, Tin House online, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues, and has received honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. McIlvain’s second novel, The Radicals, is due out in February. A former recipient of the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, he now lives with his family in Florida, where he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Tampa.  

Reviews

[Tammy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eli, Sam and Alex are drop outs from grad school at NYU and become members of a collective that protest a large energy company that has misused funds and created havoc in thousands of people’s lives. Jobs and homes are lost and retirement funds frittered away. The first protest is not unlike the Occupy Movement. This isn’t active enough and, as some of the members become zealots, things become violent. The first fifty pages are far from riveting and by the end of the book I didn’t care what happened to anyone. The characters are a bit flat and there is a lot of prose that simply meanders about. It pains me to give two stars but there it is.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was among a handful of review copies I was sampling, and the first few pages were so attention-grabbing and unusual that I just couldn't stop reading. It's not the subject matter: needless to say, the lives of middle-class graduate students in New York have been chronicled more than enough. It's the way it's written – throwing you straight into the physicality of a game of tennis between two friends, who we learn are Eli (the narrator) and Sam, and providing an irresistible piece of bait: 'I couldn't have known I was standing across the net from a murderer, and neither could he.' Then wisely skipping over the uninteresting stuff, moving straight from Eli meeting a girl in a lift to months later, when they're dating – just enough to make the relationship engaging without subjecting us to the minutiae of how they got to be a couple.

Eli is dragging himself through a neverending PhD and working as a teaching assistant, barely getting by. (Although he's also the sort of person who spins a bit of a sob story at dinner with his parents and comes away with a cheque for TEN GRAND, so don't feel too sorry for him.) When he meets and falls in love with Jen, a similarly half-hearted student whose real passion is music, she becomes the centre of his universe. But at the same time Eli keeps being drawn back to his ex Alex and Sam, who're now dating each other. The two of them are heavily involved in a shadowy political action group and live together in a shared house/collective/squat, dubbed the Phoenix House, along with a number of other activists.

It doesn't seem like Eli has terribly strong feelings about anything political, more that he's in love with the idea of being both an activist and a consummate theorist. He has a guilty privileged person's awareness that perhaps he should develop some convictions; is in awe of Alex and Sam's commitment to their cause. Which is not to say that Alex and Sam are any less driven by guilt. A lot of the characters' behaviour comes off as performative, but this doesn't necessarily make them hateful – they're idealists nonetheless. Yet it's easy to see how Sam's own frustration at the group's lack of decisive action leads him down a dangerous path. Watching the characters make terrible decisions is maddening – they seem so unbelievably clueless sometimes – but I believe McIlvain wants us to think this. The group's privilege may be annoying, but it's an important component of who they are and crucial to what they end up doing.

The downside: I think you're meant to have some emotional investment in Eli and Jen, but the two of them as a couple are completely and utterly nauseating – I was just dying for them to split up. I found my eyes glazing over during the many passages of Eli droning on about Jen's virtues and their sex life. The story of the House is much more interesting, and while I understand the relationship must exist to enhance the sense that Eli is being pulled between two worlds/versions of himself, it's a drag to read about and impossible to root for.

I love first-person narratives in which the narrator actively alludes to the fact that they're telling a story, dropping hints and acknowledging their own unreliability; The Radicals is a fantastic example. Though I occasionally got irritated with Eli's pretentiousness and self-absorption, I found most of the story absolutely fascinating. McIlvain's hypnotic, fluid prose is a perfect fit for scenes depicting movement and action, and the book is at its best when it's most kinetic: the electric opening sequence with the tennis match and car chase; the chaotic shock of the climactic scenes.

I received an advance review copy of The Radicals from the publisher, Penguin Random House.

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[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a poignant reminder of what it’s like to be growing up then expected to be grown up in such a short time span. What happens when one isn’t ready for the real world and then is influenced by those that are in the real world but have no idea what the real world is? Ideals are ill-formed, peer pressure sets in, immature decisions lead to rash behavior then tragedy strikes.

The story centers on Eli – an immature grad student that isn’t ready to graduate – and his push & pull struggle between what is present and what could be. On one hand, he has a beautiful, talented girlfriend that loves him and their life that could be, that should be, all it needs is time and maturity. On the other hand, he has a best friend that is radicalized and daring - who just so happens to be romantically involved with Eli’s first real girlfriend; his world is exciting and dangerous.

Eli’s real problem is he can’t make up his mind…ever. He fluctuates between both worlds wearing two faces. Eventually, as we all know, the worlds will collide. This is Eli’s story.

I gave this story three stars for the excellent writing but it fell short of four stars in character development.

I received an advanced copy of this book in electronic format from firsttoread.com in exchange for an honest review.

[Celia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked The Radicals. I had not experienced a book like this before. The plot describing drop-out grad students who are involved in confronting social action issues brought on by greedy corporates – interesting!! I felt the descriptive prose affected me as well. It was written in such a way as to force me to read slowly, savoring every image and idea. Personally it appealed because of familiar locales: NYC, Arizona and Zion National Park, to name a few. The references to music, although technical at times, were special too.

What is important to me? The well-turned phrase; the seamless, flowing narrative. This book caused a smile many times because of the wording and images evoked by the narrative. I must admit, the characters were ALL dysfunctional in some way. Luckily, I don’t HAVE to have likeable, mature characters to like a book, even though that’s nice.

It’s obvious to me, reading other reviews that this book is not for everybody. To me, it was an entertaining and worthwhile read.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two graduate school dropouts become friends through their involved in an 'Occupy'-like movement, but things change when one of them becomes violent.

At times I enjoyed the author’s writing style, but I found it very challenging to stay interested in the story and I really didn’t care for or about any of the characters.

[Angie Reisetter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-written story about stomach-turning characters. There seems to be a current in literature that strives to keep characters real by making them despicable, and this book swims deep in that river. I'm not jumping in. There are many real people in my life that do examine their own actions with a conscience, and I would consider these fictional characters in The Radicals aberrations. As such, if a story is not driven by characters, it usually requires a compelling idea, a well-examined ideology, or at least a gripping plot, and I feel like the book fell short. Perhaps it was reaching for the ideology, a political commentary on utopian-minded leftists, but it didn't get there for me.

But man, as much as I resented spending time with these characters, I did it anyway, almost as if I didn't have a choice. The writing was so focused and clean, even while living in the head of a cerebral but somehow also thoughtless protagonist, it pulled me forward. When my schedule required that I put the book down, I was reluctant to pick it up again, but while I was reading, putting it down was the farthest thing from my mind. I really have to hand it to McIlvain in writing skill alone. I'd certainly be interested in his other work if he comes up with a character I can stand. The whole experience of readership for this book was somewhat mystifying and amazing for me.

I got a copy to review from First to Read.

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Radicals, the second novel from the talented Ryan McIlvain, is a compelling follow-up to his memorable debut Elders. The narrator of The Radicals is Eli, a disenchanted PhD candidate in socialist theory at NYU. When we meet Eli, his plummet has begun with a “soul-soddenness, the weight of waste” regarding his dissertation and his purpose in life. On the verge of dropping out, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with Sam Westergard, a poet in the MFA program. Sam’s rash personality draws him into the intrigue of Marxist ideas. The two form a camaraderie with their activism directed at the reviled CEO of Soline. The corporation has left its employees stripped of jobs, homes, and pensions. Leading the group joined by Eli and Sam is the charismatic Alex. She too is a grad school delinquent and also Eli’s former flame. Other students round out the activist group with their intentions set on confronting Soline. After a failed protest in Phoenix for a former Soline employee, the group devolves into risky ideology, spearheaded by Sam’s fanatical plans. As Eli’s life spirals into chaos, he charts his own entanglements in the irrationality and illogic that are fueling the group’s actions. With fascinating insight, McIlvain explores the misguided decisions that lead to the characters’ detachment with reality. The Radicals is a riveting novel that addresses how unchecked activism can go terribly wrong. It is, moreover, a stimulating literary narrative in which McIlvain offers his meticulous eye to detail. He creates an immersive mood of somberness and tension as circumstances unfold in thrilling fashion. In the end, he captures the guilt and shame of those caught up in events that spiral far beyond the gravity of their moral compass.

[Hope Sloper · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Radicals is one of those novels that is so well-written you feel as though you have to love it. Ryan McIlvain is spectacular at his craft which makes the book very easy to read and understand. His writing is so focused and clean, I knew within the first few pages that the execution of the novel was going to be on point.

Yet, I didn’t love it.

I understand why people find love in poetry, I, however, am not one of those people. There are random drops of prose throughout the novel and it was very pointless to me. I ended up skipping right over most of them.

Also, I’m a character loving fool. I’ll admit it. I have to at least like one character, otherwise, my interest in their outcome, and often the story’s outcome is lost. While funny at times, Eli is insanely indecisive which was something that grated on me throughout the novel. He and Sam make a lot of really childish decision which didn’t make sense to me given their age and background.

Overall I liked the book. I wanted to love it, I did, but there were too many things the characters did that annoyed me.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of this novel intrigued me: failed grad students get caught up in an Occupy-like movement and things go too far.

Unfortunately, I disliked all of the characters so much, I stopped caring about what happened to them, so the plot itself meant little to me. The main characters all seemed pretentious and arrogant, and there was little character development beyond that. I never got a good handle on WHY any of the characters made the choices, or behaved, that they did. I can't tell if the author made everyone purposely unlikeable, and at the end of the day, I guess it doesn't matter

This read a little like a lite version of a Franzen novel to me. It's well-written, and I feel like I SHOULD like it, but I don't.

I received an advanced digital copy of this book through Penguin's First to Read program, in exchange for an honest review.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written slow-burn suspense novel that both delights and devastates.

The novel follows two graduate students, their friendship, and their changing lives as they participate in Occupy-like protests and then get more involved in an underground movement of their own. The novel fearlessly confronts our feelings on the protesters’ privilege, malaise, and desire for change as they try to navigate from the page to the street, and it does so deftly, without being either cruel or coddling.

I found the scenes at the foreclosure of an Arizona family’s home particularly moving and the relationship between Eli and Jen beautifully rendered. This is a rare novel that supports its deepening plot with beautiful writing and stomach-churning access to a character spiraling, whether of his own volition or as he is caught up in the undertow, towards destruction.

[Stella · Rating 1 out of 5]

If there’s one thing I can’t read enough of, it’s the struggle of middle-class over-privileged graduate students. ….

Clearly this is a joke. The Radicals by Ryan McIlvain is the story of Eli and Sam, two tennis playing friends who talk about socialism in their every day conversations. Eli starts dating Jen and Sam starts dating Alex, who is Eli’s ex. Eli and Sam live in a squat, called the Phoenix House and are part of a political action group with some less than ideal beliefs. Eli is…insufferable. He complains about his life to his parents and walks away with a $10,000 check. It’s very Hannah from Girls.

At some point, I’m going to stop reading books by men. Forever. This just another of those books that I slogged though, just because. I, quite frankly, don’t care about the plight of white men in graduate school who come from privilege and feel like they are the most important people. I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t like it.

Thanks to Blogging for Books and the publisher for the review copy.

[Charles Duffie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do you do with your conscience, with your life, in this world where “predatory capitalism has never been more invisible, more inevitable-seeming”? That dilemma tears at Ira, the narrator of this haunting novel. Ira is a Socialist, grad student, intellectual, atheist. And yet, through Mcilvain’s alchemy, Ira becomes a modern Everyman. I felt each step of his journey; his confusion, helplessness, even his earnestness. Far from being a decisive character, Ira, like many of us, is lost.

Ira meets Sam, an MFA poet looking for a more radical form of expression. This will lead him to underground Socialists calling themselves The Group, including Alex, his charismatic and no-nonsense ex-girlfriend. At the same time, Ira will meet and fall in love with the opposite: Jen, a beautiful pianist who wants a very different life. The stage is set. As an Enron-like company makes headlines for bankrupting millions of lives, and The Group plans to take some form of extreme action, and Ira gets engaged to Jen who may be the love of his life, we feel the tension build: we are on a collision course. By the end of this novel, none of the characters will be the same.

Yes somehow, through it all — the deceptions, the wreckage, the deaths — Mcilvain never loses sight of Eli’s humanity. The tender moments in this novel are some of the most touching of all. I think, in part, the secret is in the writing. The prose is beautiful, filled with quick poetic imagery, and Mcilvain does something unique with it: he re-describes the physical world over and over through Ira’s “doomy imagination.” The cities, the houses, the rooms, the weather, and especially the faces. Eli sees Sam and Alex and Jen different each time, noting something new or familiar, which in turn reveals something new or familiar within himself. This is Eli grasping at the world, trying to find the truth underneath the appearances, and for me it made for an evocative read. I felt like I was seeing (and re-seeing) the world through Eli’s eyes. Do yourself a favor: read this one slowly, think as you go, sink in.

Radicals is a disturbing, timely novel. Like Ira, I feel torn between the comforts of a conventional life and the injustice that seems necessary to support it; between ideals and reality. And like Ira, I don’t know what to do about it anymore. I’ve protested. I’ve donated. Such actions exerted pressure on the power structures in the past. But now? As Ira observes, “Marches and protests were the release valves a militarized state let the people pull.” So what do you do? Do you keep grinding away? Do you take more extreme action? Radials is a heartfelt, intelligent, and honest exploration of a question that may be impossible to answer.

[Marymetobooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eli is a grad student at NYU who can’t seem to finish his thesis. His field of study is Socialist Theory, but Eli is no radical. He is introspective, indecisive, and pessimistic, and he seems to have lost any fervor he might once have had towards Marxist theory. He befriends Sam, a graduate student pursuing a MFA in poetry. Sam is all that Eli is not: charismatic, spontaneous, driven towards action over idealistic discussion. This novel is the story of their friendship and is also the story of the destruction of both of their lives. The story is told from the perspective of Eli, who follows along in Sam’s wake and seems helpless to change the trajectory of either Sam’s or his own path. Eli tutors Sam in Socialist Theory, but theory alone is not enough for Sam. Sam becomes involved in protesting the actions of a company called Soline (think Enron), which has left its former employees without jobs, pensions, & even homes, as they inevitably face foreclosure due to nonpayment of their mortgages. Eli travels with Sam to Arizona to join in a protest over the impending eviction of one of Soline’s former employees. This protest, in reality, only hurts the affected homeowner, as the activists decline (on moral grounds) to pass on an offer that would have allowed this person to stay in the home. Frustrated with the relative ineffectiveness of this peaceful protest, Sam joins a smaller group of more radical activists. This group includes Alex, a former girlfriend of Eli, and she and Sam become a couple. This group lives together in a house/headquarters, relies on petty crime and contributions from clueless parents to pay living expenses, and focuses its wrath on the former CEO of Soline, who continues to live his wealthy life unscathed. Eli eventually joins this group of radicals and moves in with them, having dropped out of school, lost his job, lied to his parents, and ruined his relationship with the very non-radical woman who was the love of his life. And things only go downhill from there for both Eli and Sam. Eli’s passive response to Sam’s escalating emotions and restless need to act results in Sam bringing Eli along on the ride of his life and of Sam’s ultimate death. There are no happy endings here, just a lot to ponder. Was this ending inevitable? What was the point of no return for Eli? Was it the moment he met Sam? Thank you to Penguin books and the First to Read program for the opportunity to read and review this book in return for an honest review.

[Zachary Houle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Are you a Marxist? Do you miss the days of Occupy? Here’s a novel to digest, then. Ryan McIlvain’s sophomore novel The Radicals is essentially a state of the union for the protest movement. And it doesn’t look too kindly on that movement at all. The story is told from the viewpoint of a young man named Eli who is pursuing a political post-graduate degree in New York City. He becomes friendly with a classmate and tennis partner, Sam. Together, the two join up with an extracurricular protest against an energy company called Soline that is essentially breaking the backs of its workers. There are slight complications: Sam is dating Eli’s ex-girlfriend Alex, and Alex is a member of this protest group.

While Eli is now seeing a young musician and composer named Jen, that relationship slowly begins to slide off the rails — along with Eli’s academic career in general — as he, Sam and Alex get deeper and deeper into protest, which culminates in a murder (or two). Can Eli extricate himself from the protesters’ extremist politics? Or will he be implicated in the protest group’s crimes? Or both?

That’s the gist of The Radicals, which is a quick read at 288 pages. (I read this on a Kindle, but the page count is from the publisher.) Off the top, I’d like to say that McIlvain is a consummate crafter of words. Each word of his prose carries real weight, and it has the cadence of late period Jonathan Lethem. In fact, this book reminds me a bit of Lethem’s Dissident Gardens, just not set in the past and is not loaded to the gills with all sorts of philosophical references. Another trick that the author McIlvain employs is letting his characters speak in monologues. Now, a piece of writing advice given to young writers is to generally avoid monologues. However, McIlvain avoids any pitfalls associated with this device by doing it masterfully. His characters speak of past experiences in the same way that two friends might share a story at a coffee house in a social gathering. This creates a closeness between the reader and characters, as though the former is a fly on the wall in the latter’s (fictional) lives.

Read the rest here: https://medium.com/@zachary_houle/a-r...

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Radicals, Ryan McIlvain explores the tension between fighting for the middle class and losing oneself in the zeitgeist. At the beginning of the novel, Eli, a graduate student in New York City, is disenchanted with his degree program but marching forward, dutifully, anyway—and doing so becomes easier when he falls in love with Jen, a beautiful undergraduate pianist who keeps him from spinning off into a cyclone of existential doubts.

Soon, though, his ennui catches up to him. He visits Phoenix with a ragtag group of protesters and grad school drop-outs intent upon standing up to Soline, a fictional take on Wall-Street-meets-Monsanto. Sam, their leader, is Eli’s tennis partner, but he’s also dating Eli’s ex-girlfriend, and the two of them suck Eli in with their charisma and semi-sexual energy.

As Eli becomes closer with Sam and Alex, his life spirals further and further out of control. He drops out of his degree program and his relationship with Jen, descending into chaos until he has completely given himself over to the movement. The plot really picks up toward the end of the novel, when the narrator’s promise of a murder, alluded to early in the book, comes to the forefront of the story.

I enjoyed the language and the descriptions in this novel. Sentences like “I remembered how hot Jen’s apartment could get in the late summer. I felt the weight of the brackish river water in the air, an expectation of fall,” brought me right back to the streets of Manhattan. And McIlvain weaves poetry into his prose seamlessly, with sentences such as “The land was bunching up, smoothing out again, accordion-like, uncertain.” Aesthetically, this novel does a lot of work to sweep you up in the zeitgeist, too.

Other parts of the novel were less convincing. I was left wondering why Eli would leave his seemingly perfect, delicious girlfriend for a movement that lacks direction and cohesion. So much of the novel is spent drawing Jen, who ultimately feels like a bit of a fantasy, only to promptly drop her.

But, no matter. If you like poetic prose and narratives thick with cultural reference, you’ll love The Radicals—you might even find yourself lost in it.

[Terri · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the surface Eli and Sam seem like any other twenty-somethings—they are attending grad school, they philosophize just for fun, they play tennis together and they develop a social conscience. What sets these two apart is their eventual spiral into life's gray area where good intentions cannot solve the world's problems, only show them that as part of a privileged class, they are really just another part of the problem keeping everyone else down.

Eli and Sam take what was to be a stand against corporate America and its greed a step too far. They start by trying to save the home of a woman in Arizona who was getting a raw deal, but the other social activists that they meet during this time will help shape their outlook on social justice and plant the seed that turns a weekend college protest into a Weathermen-esque plot for violence against one of the one-percenters.

I do like the writing style of this novel, however, I don't have an ounce of sympathy for Eli, Sam, or any of the other characters that grace this book. Even Maria from Arizona ends up being a sellout, with little thanks to those who tried to help her. Eli and Sam are privileged themselves, which quite a lot of college and grad students somehow forget while they are trying to fight for social change, so it makes for a muted argument as to how they could get it in their minds that they are essential to national or global change. Eli in particular is living in a haze of laziness—at any point in this novel Eli could have just stopped, evaluated where he was, hit the parents up for another check, and established a life for himself. But he doesn't. If feels like he has little connection to the Group after Arizona, yet his indecisiveness just keeps him tagging along for it all. With the end not really giving readers any sort of satisfaction (whether you liked Eli or not), it sort of fell flat, just like Eli's good intentions from the beginning.

*Book provided by Blogging for Books

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Protests are sadly becoming a more necessary and common occurrence, but the extreme actions of a select few protesters in The Radicals by Ryan McIlvain are far from the norm.

To read this, and other book reviews, visit my website: http://makinggoodstories.wordpress.com/.

Graduate students Sam and Eli have become friends despite their disparate backgrounds. From a chance meeting in a class to becoming tennis partners, Eli and Sam teach each other different things about their respective viewpoints and ways of living. Using their energy to protest the evils perpetrated by a large energy company, Soline, Sam meets fellow protesters from Eli’s past, who all become a significant part of his future. As Sam becomes more devoted, even obsessed, with making a statement through his actions against an ex-CEO of Soline, things turn deadly, drawing the friends into a web of deceit and obfuscation until it reaches its head.

With well-crafted writing that is clean and focused, I was taken aback by how unfocused this book is with its characters and plot in driving a reader forward through its pages. Beyond the timely and important sociopolitical elements that this narrative addresses, there’s little to relate to – the characters aren’t particularly interesting or developed beyond broad strokes, and they’re honestly rather annoying in the behavior they exhibit, which doesn’t quite fit with their ages and backgrounds. The narrative often took detours to tangents that didn’t seem relevant at the time and weren’t really relevant to the rest of the story once it got back on track – if the tangents served a greater purpose this could have been a decent tactic, but it didn’t deliver.

*I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

[Helois · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am going to preface this review by saying that, it was very well written and researched book, However, it was just a little too much politics for me.

The plot is interesting and very much about current political situations, socialism, the occupy movement and protesting. The writing was fluid and moved along at a good pace. It was, in my opinion very boring, nothing really happened, until the end of the story when things became violent. Other than that nothing, I could not bring myself to care about the characters or their agenda in protesting an energy company with a CEO who has misappropriated funds and cheated employees. Told from the point of view of Eli, the story is basically a slice of his life, from dropping out of grad school and becoming involved in a socialist group, to protesting the energy company in Arizona...somewhere in there he gets an engaged, but flakes out on the girl and the engagement ends. This group that Eli gets involved with.. the "leader" becomes a bit obsessive and quickly becomes paranoid and angry..eventually leading to a disbanded group and violence.

If politics, is your thing... than this book is for you. If your only marginally interested in politics, you may not enjoy it as much.

* I received a copy from Blogging for books, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

[Susan Beamon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I occasionally have trouble getting into books, especially ones that can be classified as literary novels. For me, this novel presented questions I'm not sure were intended. As the narrator Eli, says, this is a bunch of failed graduate students. They basically live by stealing while they protest the thief's by the corporate world. They mouth the kant of the Marxist/socialist world but don't really live the creed. In other words, they talk the talk but don't walk the walk. The group fractures as the dominate personalities descend into obsession and violence. Long before guns showed up, I felt that death had taken over. Things unraveled from there.
I think my biggest problem with the book was the aimlessness of Eli. He made a good start with his education. He had a fiance. I'm not sure of his work goal and how he expected to earn a living. He wandered into The Group, but was never more than a hanger-on. When things went south, he retreated to his parents basement. It's sort of like, he blinked and then wondered how he got to where he ended up.
I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

[Noor · Rating 5 out of 5]

McIlvain's writing is vivid, lucid, and immersive. Although The Radicals is not particularly fast-paced, McIlvain's style is more than enough to keep the reader going, even through the sometimes frustrating inner thoughts of the characters that drive the novel. The Radicals leaves disenchanted liberals with a lot to ponder: if protesting in the traditional ways is not extreme enough to create real change, how should activists respond? If one lives a relatively privileged and conventional, comfortable life with the conveniences made possible by the exploitation of others, how should one cope with the guilt? What is an appropriate, practical, and ultimately, moral response? While The Radicals certainly does not answer these questions, it is a relevant novel that provides relief from such poignant and cerebral questions by being written in a way that makes use of any and all sensory details.

Overall, would recommend taking some time to slowly digest the book and have patience with the characters. The reading experience and thought-provoking questions make it well worth it.

*I received an advance copy from the author. Thoughts and opinions, however, are my own.

[Luke Hillier · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the strongest starts to a book I've read in a while; the charged tennis match between Eli and Sam ending in the reveal that they'd both become murderers definitely hooked me early on. McIlvain is an excellent writer at the line-by-line level and does a terrific job with some quick, effective world-building and characterization in the first third here. Unfortunately, the overall narrative seems to grow a bit unwieldy in his grasp and eventually this unspooled into something more average and fine. Alex ultimately reads as a disappointingly underdeveloped plot device and I thought the love triangle dynamic was simultaneously unnecessary and underutilized. I enjoyed the depiction of paranoia in the house and thought the idea that Sam's Mormonism was a seed for his radicalization was interesting. By the end, the book has morphed into something way more intense than how it began, but in a way that was more or less predictable -- and I happened to really enjoy how it began.

[Jesse Ehrlich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ryan McIlvain's second novel is a dark journey into the world of social activism gone wrong. It follows the lives of three grad students in New York who start out by helping victims of corporate greed but then become increasingly violent in their pursuit of justice.

Mr. McIlvain spins the story out slowly and deliberately using rich prose as he confidently describes the characters and plot in an eerily plausible way. We often think of domestic terrorism as mass shootings or other actions affecting multiple victims. But this edgy thriller depicts a different type of terrorism - one in which the intended targets are part of the corporate hierarchy, and the perpetrators are 'ordinary' grad students.

In today's political climate, the story seems especially relevant, and I found myself thinking about The Radicals long after I had finished the book. Highly recommended!

[J.B. · Rating 1 out of 5]

The cover is beautiful. It has almost a felt kinda feel to it and I dig that a lot.

That’s about all the good I can say about the story. It’s a book where the narrator accounts his destruction. It starts with a tennis match, ramps up with a car chase that ends in such an unrealistic way that I had to put the book down. You simply do not go out of your way to chase the person who hit you down, risking your like and the life of others, simply to take a bribe. There were hints at cutesy prose and unnecessary details that told me everything I was about to go through if I continued with this book. I wasn’t interested.

A lot of verbal gesticulating with no real substance. I would avoid this story unless you don’t mind fancy prose, and unwanted second-by second accounts of everything

[A.J. Garner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This made me aware of how hard it would be to write Rules of Attraction or Less than Zero now. Have the rules of class struggle changed since the 80's? No. Has the middle to rich liberal youths wanted the same thing in each decade? I feel like I am reading about myself mixed with Less than zero mixed in. Minus the first thirty to fifty pages, I enjoyed this book. It made me think and reflect. It made me think of Gen X literature. It made me think of getting older and youth ideals fading.

[Liam Morrissey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful novel that examines the mucky personal and human side of activism, and how those threads both complement and undermine even the most neatly held mechanisms of belief. A story very much desired by our current cultural moment that also manages to feel fresh and bold. A more compelling, more original, and less cartoonish version of the novel Franzen was trying to write with Purity.

[Beth · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was an absolute SLOG to get through this book. The characters were irredeemably unlikable, the "plot" didn't even really get going until 180-ish pages in, and there were a ridiculous number of rambling tangents and asides that had ZERO to do with the story. Skip.

[Kathleen Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to tell all of these characters to get a job. To move to middle America and get a job. That's an unusual reaction from me (especially since I live squarely in the Volvo zone) but I could not summon any sympathy for them. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC which I DNF.

[Michael Alan Grapin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bunch of twenty-somethings out to change the world. The end justifies the means? They turn out to be as bad as the rich jerks they protest. I found it very difficult to sympathize with any of the characters.

[Blaine Morrow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good story, marred by a lack of characters with whom to empathize.

[Doc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cool premise. Made me think of The Americans (TV show). Yet, at the end of the day, this work not as good as others I've read.