The Unwitting

February 17, 2014
The witch hunts of McCarthyism and the Cold War provide an appropriate backdrop for the this intelligent but overly detached novel from Feldman (Next to Love) about the betrayals and secrets of a marriage. Cornelia and Charlie Benjamin are part of New York City’s liberal intelligentsia: he edits Compass, a left-wing magazine in which her writing often appears. But when Charlie is killed in an apparent mugging on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Cornelia learns he was living a double life. She narrates the story of their relationship in retrospect, hinting at but not disclosing Charlie’s secret, relying on clumsy foreshadowing to supply tension: “Looking back at it now...”; “Later I found out...”; “We should have known…” The novel moves from 1948 to 1971, and its impressive scope keeps the story emotionally distant—readers familiar with the era may appreciate the many high points mentioned, but Cornelia often seems to be recounting historical events rather than personal ones, telling her own story with the distance of a historian rather than the involvement of a participant. Still, there are poignant moments when she considers the way both personal and political memories shift with revealed knowledge, comparing recollection and truth to a reversible coat: “If I wore it on one side, it looked a certain way. If I turned it inside out, it was an entirely different animal.”