Red White and Blue

The title suggests the poster-paint colors with which Dunne portrays America in the last quarter-century. Let red stand for Leah Kaye, radical feminist lawyer; white, for Benedictine Father "Bro" Broderick, trendy celebrity priest; and blue, for long-suffering ex-husband and brother, Jack Broderick, "a successful failure" as a writer. The pilgrimages of the former two take them from the execution of a black radical through elections in a Latin American country to their murder by "a human time bomb" Vietnam veteran. Only then does Jack briefly awaken from his "passion for the vicarious." The novel aspires to the acerbic nihilism of Ambrose Bierce, from whom its epigraph, but contents itself with knocking down straw men, the opportunistic leading the naive on behalf of the unworthy in an essentially static portrait in black.