Mr. Silver’s unusual perspective and wide-range of material are enough to make this a memorably offbeat debut.
Mr. Silver's unusual perspective and wide range of material are enough to make this a memorably offbeat debut. So is the palpable struggle that he captures on the page. Far from being wispily nostalgic, Backward-Facing Man is still fighting to make sense of its characters' late-60's political conviction and wonder what became of it.
— The New York Times
A dark elegy for '60s campus radicalism and its turn toward violence in the years that followed, Silver's debut novel is a complex, beautifully turned-out thriller. Set in 1999-2000 and told by trust-funded failed writer Winnie Prescott, the narrative (which includes a role for Winnie's childhood friend Patty Hearst) centers on Lorraine Nadia, who has recently died, and her legal secretary daughter, Stardust. Shortly after her mother's death, Stardust encounters a disheveled man on a Philadelphia commuter train who notes cryptically that "Your mother and I, we go way back." He turns out to be local factory owner Chuck Puckman, whose younger, more radical self was a lover of Lorraine's-as was Frederick Keane, the infamous Volcano Bomber, who remains in hiding. The novel shuttles back and forth between Chuck, Lorraine and Frederick's eventually diverging paths; Chuck's present struggles to save his manufacturing business after an environmental disaster; and Stardust's efforts to piece together the story and search for Frederick. Silver handles all of the elements cleanly, writing convincingly in the voice of Winnie, who has never been good at much of anything. The plot has real bite-no matter what one's political persuasion. (Sept. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
There are no heroes to be found in this debut novel about a government conspiracy involving three protesters from the 1960s. Thirty years later, each character has redeeming qualities, but none is a stellar human being. Chuck Puckman is being prosecuted after an industrial accident, Frederick Keane, a.k.a "the Volcano Bomber," remains on the run from the FBI, and Lorraine Nadia, one-time lover to both men, has abandoned her daughter to search for the father she never knew. Readers familiar with the era's history will be intrigued by the interweaving of the Patty Hearst kidnapping. However, the shifting narrative threads and time line, which visits 1968, 1974, 1999, and 2000, can be confusing. Often, Silver, a former manufacturing executive, seems on the verge of profound insights into the motivations of 1960s activists, though he falls short of any original revelations or proof of government conspiracies. Yet overall the story comes together. With an online reading group guide as well as radio promotion and author appearances planned, libraries should expect requests. [Susan Choi's American Woman also deals with the Patty Hearst case.-Ed.]-Karen Traynor, Sullivan Free Lib., Chittenango, NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
"America loves to watch someone's life disintegrate," writes debut novelist Silver in a narrative brimming with crises and explosives. For all Stardust Nadia knows, her mom is just another survivor of the '60s, her dad some nameless dude out of the Woodstock generation. Stardust's curiosity about both parents rises several notches when mother Lorraine, an elegant woman with connections to the radical left, disappears while on an alpine skiing holiday; her frozen body is recovered-or is it hers?-at just about the time graybeard ponytail types start showing up to tell Stardust about the good-old/bad-old days of countercultural yore. Stardust, bright but a touch misdirected, as any Telemachus must be, isn't above turning a few tricks to pay the bills; neither is she shy of hooking up with some of the latter-day New Left types who haunt John Ashcroft's dreams, and whose escapades parallel the journeys of the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Lorraine suspects that there's a rogue government plot afoot to bust Patty Hearst anew, which would end her bid for a presidential pardon as Clinton prepares to leave office at the dawn of the new millennium; from her we learn that "the whole SLA thing was a government setup," a not-implausible scenario. The plot thickens as various elements of movements old and new play cat-and-mouse with the feds, who are not very nice. The omniscient narrator of this tale, too young to have firsthand memory of the time, is full of didactic pointers on the meaning of the blissful '60s and the ugly '70s. Silver's narrative gets a little crowded and textbookish at times, but for those who remember the days of Tania and Cinque, his tale rings true.
