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Island in the Atlantic

其他書名	A Novel
出版	Greenwood Press, 1970
主題	Fiction / General
ISBN	08371392529780837139258
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=ufkfAQAAIAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋A historical novel, set in what was still the relatively recent past at the time of its writing. It begins with the Draft Riots of 1863 and ends in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic (here aptly renamed the Cosmopolis). The "island" of the title is Manhattan. The protagonist is a lawyer named Jonathan Hartt, a secular Jew whose youthful reforming zeal ebbs as he settles into middle age, leaving him in a profound moral crisis. An inter-generational constellation of characters extends out around him, each struggling with his or her own existential dilemmas, conflicts of conscience, and burdens of responsibility and guilt. Their lives are convincingly set against the backdrop of historical events and political forces of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, especially the reform and labor movements, shown pushing back unsuccessfully against the expansion of U.S. industrialism. Fundamental issues about the value and meaning of individual human lives are raised here, explicitly in their conversations and implicitly in their actions, especially through the contrast between those who pursue wealth and power at all costs, and those who strive after some "higher" ambition -- chief among them Jonathan in his devotion to the law, and his closest friend, Evan Cleeve, whose passion for music conflicts with his influential father’s expectations for his legal and political career. Perhaps Jonathan’s and Evan’s failures will be overcome by Jonathan’s son Jeff (short for Jefferson), whose dedication to architecture, a pursuit that is both civic-minded and artistic, synthesizes the divergent alternatives of the previous generation. This is an open question at the novel’s end.