...an appropriately subtle espionage tale, told in spare prose ... This novel is to literature what pointillism is to art, with dots that combine to make a whole picture, one that merges a moving love story with details of a profession that, by its nature, involves both loyalty and duplicity. A stunner.
Lea Carpenter’s Red, White, Blue is...less an unfolding story than a series of set pieces, using—rehearsing might be a better word—some of the tropes of the spy thriller. There’s nothing new about this: Many a self-consciously literary novelist has dipped a toe in the genre in order to examine themes of identity, betrayal, duplicity and so on. Few, though, have skated quite so lightly over the surface of the world they’re borrowing ... What the threads have in common is a kind of dreamlike, affectless prose that effectively nulls characterization ... And the individual sections are, if anything, overcrafted, each straining for its own little epiphany ... Narrative scaffolding, indeed, is conspicuous by its absence throughout, and while we’re told at one point that 'the order in which we receive facts matters,' this isn’t borne out by the text, many of whose sections could be rearranged without fracturing the story. And yet, it weaves a spell. Though mannered and elliptical throughout, it’s more readable than those qualities usually herald, and in the end there’s something hypnotic about its stately, confessional prose. I’d hesitate to classify it as a spy novel, because it pretty clearly doesn’t want to get grubby. No: It’s a novel in which some of the characters are identified as spies. But in its contemplation of different kinds of lost innocence, it’s also pondering the fall.
The foregoing description of Red, White, Blue may suggest a gripping tale of what Anna learns about her father, and the effects of this new information. But while the novel touches on these topics, it is far from gripping ... the meandering narrative, its shifts in place and time, and the repetitive obiter dicta soon weaken its hold ... Characterization does little to remedy this hobbled narrative. While Anna is described almost obsessively, she rarely comes alive on the page ... Thematically the novel is more interesting. It explores truth, or rather, how we know what’s true ...
Readers who are interested in exploring such conundrums may find plenty to intrigue them ... Lovers of the roller-coaster spy thriller or the artfully characterized literary novel will be disappointed.
