What do you think?
Rate this book
The Go-Between
A faded newspaperman downs a double Maker’s Mark and contemplates life as a “ham-and-egger,” a hack. Then one day he finds the scoop of a lifetime in a Chicago basement: diaries belonging to the infamous Judith Campbell Exner. Right, that Judy, the game girl who waltzed into the midst of America’s most powerful politicians, entertainers, and criminals as they conspired to rule America.
When Frank Sinatra flew Judy to Hawaii for a weekend of partying, she could hardly have imagined where it would lead her: straight to the White House and the waiting arms of Jack Kennedy. And then came the day that JFK and his brother Bobby asked her to carry a black bag to Chicago, where she was to hand it off to the boss of bosses, Sam Giancana. As our Narrator pieces the notebooks into a coherent story, he finds mob connections, rigged primaries, assassination plots, and trysts—and begins to see beyond the tabloid fare to a real woman, adrift and defenseless in a dangerous world where the fates of nations are at stake. As one by one the men Judy loved betrayed her and disappeared, and as the FBI pursued her into a living hell, her diary entries disintegrate along with the beautiful, tough, sweet woman the Narrator has come to know. Who was Exner, after all? Just a gangster’s moll? Or a bighearted woman who believed the sky-high promises of the New Frontier—and paid the price?
When Frank Sinatra flew Judy to Hawaii for a weekend of partying, she could hardly have imagined where it would lead her: straight to the White House and the waiting arms of Jack Kennedy. And then came the day that JFK and his brother Bobby asked her to carry a black bag to Chicago, where she was to hand it off to the boss of bosses, Sam Giancana. As our Narrator pieces the notebooks into a coherent story, he finds mob connections, rigged primaries, assassination plots, and trysts—and begins to see beyond the tabloid fare to a real woman, adrift and defenseless in a dangerous world where the fates of nations are at stake. As one by one the men Judy loved betrayed her and disappeared, and as the FBI pursued her into a living hell, her diary entries disintegrate along with the beautiful, tough, sweet woman the Narrator has come to know. Who was Exner, after all? Just a gangster’s moll? Or a bighearted woman who believed the sky-high promises of the New Frontier—and paid the price?
- GenresFiction
324 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
1 person is currently reading
31 people want to read
About the author
Frederick Turner
89 books9 followersFrederick Turner is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Into the Heart of Life: Henry Miller at One Hundred. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 17, 2010
When a faded newspaperman discovers diaries in a Chicago basement—hand-written epistles from the life of one infamous Judith Campbell Exner—he can scarcely believe his good fortune. Yes, that Judith Campbell Exner, the one who was linked with some of America's most powerful politicians, entertainers, and criminals as they conspired to rule America.
Our narrator hopes to find another perspective on the story, and he does just that. Not only was she a "go-between" that connected the White House, the mob, and more, but there was another side to her, too. She was a real woman, adrift and defenseless in a dangerous world where nations' fates hang in the balance. As all the men began betraying and abandoning her, she is pursued relentlessly (by the FBI) into a living hell.
Like most people, this woman was a multi-dimensional character and not just a cardboard doll used for the amusement of men.
The story was revealing and could have been intriguing. However, I was bored almost immediately—despite the exciting tale—by the writer's style of narration. His narrative wandered and meandered too much for my taste, and instead of moving along to the story itself, he seemingly got caught up in extraneous matters. Perhaps they were important aspects, but they did not serve the story well, in my opinion.
"The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years," by Frederick Turner, is a book that I can only give three stars, at best.
Our narrator hopes to find another perspective on the story, and he does just that. Not only was she a "go-between" that connected the White House, the mob, and more, but there was another side to her, too. She was a real woman, adrift and defenseless in a dangerous world where nations' fates hang in the balance. As all the men began betraying and abandoning her, she is pursued relentlessly (by the FBI) into a living hell.
Like most people, this woman was a multi-dimensional character and not just a cardboard doll used for the amusement of men.
The story was revealing and could have been intriguing. However, I was bored almost immediately—despite the exciting tale—by the writer's style of narration. His narrative wandered and meandered too much for my taste, and instead of moving along to the story itself, he seemingly got caught up in extraneous matters. Perhaps they were important aspects, but they did not serve the story well, in my opinion.
"The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years," by Frederick Turner, is a book that I can only give three stars, at best.
June 5, 2015
That was history, this is a myth; it's time to give up trying to rewrite it
"It was like Hercules being told he had one day to clean ou the king's stable and barn when the place was so deep in shit the smell of it permeated all of Greece. Well, somehow Herc did it, but then, that's a myth, and this is history, and she gave up trying to rewrite it."
"She" in this quote from "The Go-Between" is Judith Campbell Exner, who for the few shining months of Camelot on the Potomac was paramour to President, Family, and Rat Pack. The months were short--barely four years from companion to catastrophe--and the shine quickly dulled as we all learned (in the second draft of history if not the first) of the corrupt connections, the Cuban fiascoes, and the coarse, constant, and conspicuous consumption of women. Judy was one of those women, and Turner uses a fictional set of her diaries to craft his rewriting of the myth.
When I selected this book from the Amazon Vines program, I was expecting something different--perhaps wider in scope, perhaps lighter, perhaps . . . Different. What we get with "The Go-Between" is the story of an aging Chicago newspaper researcher and writer who has never made it to the top of his profession who is allowed to see and take notes from (but not photocopy or view unattended) some of Judy's diaries. The story is told second and sometimes third hand through the omnipresent narration of the unnamed reporter, as he meanders through the story, sometimes pulling bits from the diaries, other times from research, memory, interviews, or what-we-know-now-we-didn't-know-then recaps of the the history. Most of the story is chronological, but our narrator sometimes jumps ahead or refers back, and sometimes he just digresses, always talking directly to us as if we were sitting next to him at a bar discussing over drinks.
I have never been a fan of this type of narrated story, because
1. It holds the reader at long-arms length from the story and the people it is trying to tell us about. Its like experiencing a movie by having someone describe the action and dialogue to you--the narrator might be able to give you enough detail to understand the movie, but would you really enjoy it and say you experienced it?
2. The narrator becomes the central character in the story, and he must be someone we like, respect, admire, or find amusing or in some way distinctive for the story to really compel. Our narrator here doesn't fill any of those qualifications for me.
3. It takes extreme skill as a writer to make the conceit work. Turner is a good writer, good enough to keep me reading to the end when I might have quit making the effort with lesser writers. But I'm still well aware that I'm not really sitting next to the narrator at a bar hearing the story first hand, and the the asides and diversions are distracting from the main story.
And then there's the subject matter. I was born in 1959, so I am too young to remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, and even my parents don't have strong memories about the time. But for a certain portion of the population (based on age, gender, political leaning, geographic location, or religious persuasion) The Kennedy Years were a capitalized, mythic Era. I don't know anything about Turner, but he seems to be one of that group, and he uses this book as a thinly-veiled memoir of
--his impressions of the time,
--how he has dealt with the diminution of the mythic characters as we have learned both the more sordid and the merely pedestrian underside of the myth, and
--how he can rewrite the myth in his own mind to retain as much of the shining legend as he can while still nodding acknowledgment to history, an effort he more or less openly admits in the quote I used to open my review.
If you are of the age and temperament of that group with Turner, I suspect you may find this book more interesting and perhaps cathartic than I did. As it stands I consider this on my reviewing scale worthy of three stars, but no more.
"It was like Hercules being told he had one day to clean ou the king's stable and barn when the place was so deep in shit the smell of it permeated all of Greece. Well, somehow Herc did it, but then, that's a myth, and this is history, and she gave up trying to rewrite it."
"She" in this quote from "The Go-Between" is Judith Campbell Exner, who for the few shining months of Camelot on the Potomac was paramour to President, Family, and Rat Pack. The months were short--barely four years from companion to catastrophe--and the shine quickly dulled as we all learned (in the second draft of history if not the first) of the corrupt connections, the Cuban fiascoes, and the coarse, constant, and conspicuous consumption of women. Judy was one of those women, and Turner uses a fictional set of her diaries to craft his rewriting of the myth.
When I selected this book from the Amazon Vines program, I was expecting something different--perhaps wider in scope, perhaps lighter, perhaps . . . Different. What we get with "The Go-Between" is the story of an aging Chicago newspaper researcher and writer who has never made it to the top of his profession who is allowed to see and take notes from (but not photocopy or view unattended) some of Judy's diaries. The story is told second and sometimes third hand through the omnipresent narration of the unnamed reporter, as he meanders through the story, sometimes pulling bits from the diaries, other times from research, memory, interviews, or what-we-know-now-we-didn't-know-then recaps of the the history. Most of the story is chronological, but our narrator sometimes jumps ahead or refers back, and sometimes he just digresses, always talking directly to us as if we were sitting next to him at a bar discussing over drinks.
I have never been a fan of this type of narrated story, because
1. It holds the reader at long-arms length from the story and the people it is trying to tell us about. Its like experiencing a movie by having someone describe the action and dialogue to you--the narrator might be able to give you enough detail to understand the movie, but would you really enjoy it and say you experienced it?
2. The narrator becomes the central character in the story, and he must be someone we like, respect, admire, or find amusing or in some way distinctive for the story to really compel. Our narrator here doesn't fill any of those qualifications for me.
3. It takes extreme skill as a writer to make the conceit work. Turner is a good writer, good enough to keep me reading to the end when I might have quit making the effort with lesser writers. But I'm still well aware that I'm not really sitting next to the narrator at a bar hearing the story first hand, and the the asides and diversions are distracting from the main story.
And then there's the subject matter. I was born in 1959, so I am too young to remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, and even my parents don't have strong memories about the time. But for a certain portion of the population (based on age, gender, political leaning, geographic location, or religious persuasion) The Kennedy Years were a capitalized, mythic Era. I don't know anything about Turner, but he seems to be one of that group, and he uses this book as a thinly-veiled memoir of
--his impressions of the time,
--how he has dealt with the diminution of the mythic characters as we have learned both the more sordid and the merely pedestrian underside of the myth, and
--how he can rewrite the myth in his own mind to retain as much of the shining legend as he can while still nodding acknowledgment to history, an effort he more or less openly admits in the quote I used to open my review.
If you are of the age and temperament of that group with Turner, I suspect you may find this book more interesting and perhaps cathartic than I did. As it stands I consider this on my reviewing scale worthy of three stars, but no more.
January 10, 2016
The story of a party girl who finds herself hanging out with the Rat Pack, the Kennedy Clan and La Costa Nostra simultaneously only to spend the rest of her life paying the consequences sounds like a great idea for a great novel. As The Go-Between proves, there is more to great novel than a great idea.
Frederick Turner starts out by creating a distinct barrier between the subject, Judith Campbell Exner, and the reader. Instead of telling her own story, JCE's story is told by a old reporter who had access to her diaries but rarely quotes from them. Instead the reporter treats readers to his interpretation of her story. This might have worked had Turner not chosen to make the reporter the classic unreliable narrator, had the reporter fall in love with his own idea of JCE and then, for some truly unfathomable reason, make this the one reporter who can never seem to find the right words or the right analogy. Paragraphs of the narrator telling us that he can't find the right word but it's sort of like this, etc, might work once in the novel but more than once stops the novel dead in its track every single time. And that's not counting the time he's struggles for an analogy that he sort of remembers but doesn't quite. Look it up on the internet already, buddy.
There is a tie for nadir of this failed experiment. Candidate One is the entire chapter entitled "Killing MistahCastro" (JFK, you'll be shocked to learn, had an accent). Candidate Two is the narrator's ruminations on the subject of "virginality". What's that, you say. You do not want to know and you certainly don't want to know several pages of it.
That's just the writing. The plot is not much better. Whether you're a JFK fan, a JFK hater, a left-winger, a right-winger, a centrist, or a political agnostic there's something in here to make you roll your eyes in disgust. Pick a cliché about these characters and chances are it's here. So let me summarize for you: JFK and his father used the mafia to buy the nomination and then the election. (I was fascinated that the price of the Illinois and West Virginia primaries were both a briefcase full of money. One would think that on a per capita basis Illinois would be worth a suitcase full, but I digress.) But wait, there's more! Sinatra and JFK liked threesomes! RFK was a saint! Peter Lawford was a tool! And ... does anybody really still care about this foolishness? And if they do, why not read a trashy bio on any of the above and skip the faux handwringing about the corruption of it all.
I don't claim to know what the truth is about any of the above allegations. This is fiction and Turner can do what he pleases as long as he makes it all matter. He fails to do that. From the minute he introduces her to when his narrator claims to be trying to rescue JCE from being "Jack Kennedy's lay" he does her a disservice. Turner never makes Judith Campbell Exner a believable character and he very rarely shows her outside of her interactions with the cast of famous men. Jacqueline Susann could have written a better life story of JCE - at least she would have given her some humanity.
Frederick Turner starts out by creating a distinct barrier between the subject, Judith Campbell Exner, and the reader. Instead of telling her own story, JCE's story is told by a old reporter who had access to her diaries but rarely quotes from them. Instead the reporter treats readers to his interpretation of her story. This might have worked had Turner not chosen to make the reporter the classic unreliable narrator, had the reporter fall in love with his own idea of JCE and then, for some truly unfathomable reason, make this the one reporter who can never seem to find the right words or the right analogy. Paragraphs of the narrator telling us that he can't find the right word but it's sort of like this, etc, might work once in the novel but more than once stops the novel dead in its track every single time. And that's not counting the time he's struggles for an analogy that he sort of remembers but doesn't quite. Look it up on the internet already, buddy.
There is a tie for nadir of this failed experiment. Candidate One is the entire chapter entitled "Killing MistahCastro" (JFK, you'll be shocked to learn, had an accent). Candidate Two is the narrator's ruminations on the subject of "virginality". What's that, you say. You do not want to know and you certainly don't want to know several pages of it.
That's just the writing. The plot is not much better. Whether you're a JFK fan, a JFK hater, a left-winger, a right-winger, a centrist, or a political agnostic there's something in here to make you roll your eyes in disgust. Pick a cliché about these characters and chances are it's here. So let me summarize for you: JFK and his father used the mafia to buy the nomination and then the election. (I was fascinated that the price of the Illinois and West Virginia primaries were both a briefcase full of money. One would think that on a per capita basis Illinois would be worth a suitcase full, but I digress.) But wait, there's more! Sinatra and JFK liked threesomes! RFK was a saint! Peter Lawford was a tool! And ... does anybody really still care about this foolishness? And if they do, why not read a trashy bio on any of the above and skip the faux handwringing about the corruption of it all.
I don't claim to know what the truth is about any of the above allegations. This is fiction and Turner can do what he pleases as long as he makes it all matter. He fails to do that. From the minute he introduces her to when his narrator claims to be trying to rescue JCE from being "Jack Kennedy's lay" he does her a disservice. Turner never makes Judith Campbell Exner a believable character and he very rarely shows her outside of her interactions with the cast of famous men. Jacqueline Susann could have written a better life story of JCE - at least she would have given her some humanity.
March 22, 2010
I had a hard time distinguishing fact from fiction in this book, something I think speaks volumes about the quality of the writing. The dialogue "sounded" very authentic for the time period and I really enjoyed the "voice" that each character had in my head. More than anything else, this book made me think about how the media portrays people, and how I let that shape my opinions of them. I wonder how Judith Campbell Exner would come across today and how I would feel about her based only on what I saw in the media. No matter what is true or false in The Go Betweens it's fact that Frederick Turner has written a really engaging and interesting story.
June 23, 2010
Fictionalized version of the Judith Campbell Exner story. Exner was made notorious because of her relationships with JFK and certain mob figures. She lived the high life for a while and then sank into a sort of paranoid obscurity in her later years. She was hounded by the FBI for years until Hoover decided to leave her alone. She supposedly served as a go-between for Kennedy and Sam Giancana during the Cuba missile crisis when the mob was supposed to have killed Castro.
November 27, 2010
A fictionalized account of Judith Campbell, mistress of Frank Sinatra, JFK, and mob boss Sam Giancana. The story is told from the point of view of a writer writing the story. It is successful in it's style. I don't know how far it strays from what actually happened, but it was still an interesting read.
June 22, 2010
I learned nothing because I couldn't get into it...I didn't like the writing style....too many times the author addressed me as "you" that drives me crazy.
October 24, 2010
Didn't really know any of this part of the JFK presidency. Very interesting read. Only draw back...thought the author put a little too much of his thoughts and conclusions in the story.
May 12, 2011
A friend (Pam) recommended this book to me, and she was right I liked it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews