This is wonderful material, wonderfully suited to Stead's great gifts, and much of the scene, extremely difficult to translate into fiction, is wonderfully done.
In its large outline the book falters, however, and since Stead has never failed before, it is reasonable to look for explanations in the book's curious history.
Her chief fault here is not knowing when to stop, although she might defend this excess in a novel about excessive people.
The Howards are not always admirable, but they are good company.
Stead shows Emily and Stephen's tragedy as that of a generation, not of an ideology; this novel condemns corrupt Marxists, not Marxism
Her fictional character incorporates the laughing apocalypse, representing even as she displaces not only the despair and horror of the postwar years, but also, it would seem, the difficulty for a generation of committed Marxists of reconciling with their beliefs the mounting evidence of Soviet atrocities.
Hollywood provided Emily and Stephen’s first lesson in political reality, where they learned that the Party can be the enemy. Their second major political lesson is learned in postwar Europe, and it is one that they cannot just move continents to escape: that collaboration is everywhere, and may be the condition of survival.
The problem, Stead thought, was that the talent Americans had, the passion and drive which had brought them so far, was of little use in the face of the Crash, the Depression and the Cold War
Geering's opening sentence is happy, adventurous, while Stead's delivers the reader into a business atmosphere.
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