The Unwitting: A Novel
Functioning both as a complex portrait of marriage and a clear snapshot of a particularly paranoid time in American history, Feldman’s latest novel (after Next to Love, 2011), set in the early sixties, takes on the Cold War. When liberal journalist Nell Benjamin is informed that her beloved husband has been murdered in a mugging, her bright, beautiful world is upended. The editor of a progressive magazine, Charlie had been her soul mate. But what she discovers about his work, and the shadowy corporation responsible for funding it, shatters her illusions about the man she thought she knew so well. Her grand love affair is now revealed to be based on keeping secrets, and her sense of betrayal runs deep. Unsure of how to tell her daughter and how to face her friends, Nell must come to terms with her own unwitting participation in the charade. Feldman intertwines the personal and the political while clearly drawing the cultural atmosphere of the early ’60s, when definitions of patriotism were not so clear-cut and communism was a palpable threat. --Joanne Wilkinson