Final Judgment

In this trenchantly iconoclastic novel spanning the academy, publishing, and national politics, Eliot Asinof offers us a delightful window into the private life of the protagonist, Kenneth Flear, a forty-nine-year-old husband and father. Being one of the most critically acclaimed writers and political activists of his generation, and the author of a seminal book on non-violent resistance, he nonetheless feels like an outcast from New York publishing circles and withdraws to the life of a creative-writing instructor at Kingsley University near Boston.

The novel’s provocative heroine, Anne Miner—a brilliant college senior and granddaughter of a liberal seven-term U.S. senator—invites Professor Flear to join her campus protest to prevent President George W. Bush from delivering the keynote at Kingsley’s 2005 commencement ceremony. Like the complacent student body around her, Flear declines to join Anne’s movement.

When Anne single-handedly succeeds in stopping the president’s speech by delivering an incendiary rebuke of Bush and the Iraq War, her triumph is at the cost of her own life. The shaken Professor Flear then makes a Faustian bargain his suave New York editor and publisher, agreeing to pen a bestseller about the incident. When Flear’s book reaches bound-galley and is predestined for bestsellerdom, it owes its success in part to its status quo message: that Anne Miner was merely insane and that her actions therefore had no political significance.

This heartfelt and, by turns, hilarious, story reaches a climax in May 2006 at Book Expo America in Washington, D.C., where Professor Flear is scheduled to appear on a nationally televised celebrity-author panel. Awakened by his conscience to halt the publication of his book, and with the assistance of an expert publicist rallying the American bookselling community, Flear finally breaks his silence about Anne, as readers everywhere are invited to make a final judgment for themselves.