- Everybody’s work is different . . .
When my book group met a couple of weeks ago, we decided to take on John le Carré’s latest, A Delicate Truth—and for purposes of comparison, because his latest has received mixed reviews, the book that made him famous, 1964’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. We don’t normally assign ourselves two books at a time, but then we don’t normally read authors whose newest novels are their “latest.” If the word suggests a formula at work, it also suggests—or all but guarantees—a novelist who knows how to write a book readers won’t want to put down.
The cold war ended when the iron curtain collapsed in 1989; the new FX series The Americans is predicated on le Carré’s vision of it. It doesn’t argue for moral equivalency; it takes it for granted.
Meanwhile, Beeman has his priceless informant inside the Rezidentura and the Jenningses have a priceless bug inside Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s study. Everyone’s spying on everyone else. But . . . But as the season ends the informant and the bug are both revealed, not that the other side knows it yet! So we can be sure that in season two, more misunderstandings, reversals, and high jinks will ensue. And did I mention that Philip, wearing a ridiculous wig, just got married because his oblivious bride has a job that makes her a gold mine of information? Elizabeth is good with the marriage. It was his little desperate fling in New York—which he lied about—that made her throw him out of the house.
