A patriotic thriller

Thrillers don’t normally have themes. Their object is just to thrill, to entertain, not to make statements. But Susan Isaacs’s 1998 novel Red, White and Blue, with its title and from first sentence to last, does make a statement, a statement about America and about what it means to be an American. The question is, does her focus on her theme help or hinder her story?

Certainly it delays the story, or at least the main part of the story. Here Charlie Blair, a Wyoming rancher turned FBI agent, volunteers to work undercover in a racist, anti-Semitic group called Wrath that may have turned violent. Lauren Miller, an ambitious Jewish reporter from New York City, sees a Wyoming bombing as her opportunity to make a name for herself. True love, as well as true adventure, happens when the two of them meet.

What Charlie and Lauren don’t know, but Isaacs tells her readers, is that both of them share a common great-great-grandmother. She devotes the first half of the book to describing in great detail how one branch of the family ended up in Wyoming, becoming Protestant, while the rest stayed in New York. We get the stories of each link in the chains leading to Charlie and Lauren. Isaacs is a gifted writer and all this makes fine reading, yet it may feel like little more than an unusually long prologue to some readers. (The book actually does have a prologue, which Isaacs calls a preamble, in keeping with her theme.)

I, for one, am glad Isaacs chose to give her book its theme, making it less a thriller but more a serious novel.