Ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be
popular. A disgruntled New York corporate lawyer, he's more
than ready to leave his lucrative career for the excitement
and uncertainty of journalism. When he's offered the post of
foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has
sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes
the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he's been sent to
replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize
character he longs to emulate. Infuriatingly, all his fellow
journalists cannot stop talking about their beloved "Bear,"
who is no longer lighting up their work lives.
Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de
Barba—"The Daring Soldiers of Barba"—have been blowing up
the rest of the world for years in order to win independence
for a province so dismal, backward, and windblown that you
couldn't give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington
vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the "SOB"
suddenly dry up?
A droll, playful novel, The New Republic addresses weighty
issues like terrorism with the deft, tongue-in-cheek touch
that is vintage Shriver. It also presses the more intimate
question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while
the rest of us inspire a shrug? What's their secret? And in
the end, who has the better life—the admired, or the admirer?
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