The phone call that dragged George Smiley, once acting Chief of the Circus, from his bed, was a plea to return to active service. But only to bury the case, not to solve it.
George Smiley has become chief of the battered British Secret Service. The betrayals of a Soviet double agent have riddled the spy network. Smiley wants revenge. He chooses his weapon: Jerry Westerby, 'The Honourable Schoolboy', a passionate lover, and a seasoned, reckless secret agent. Westerby is pointed east, to Hong Kong. And so begins the terrifying game...
Over an extraordinary twenty-year career, Jane Smiley has written all kinds of novels: mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. “Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?” raves Time magazine. But in the wake of 9/11, Smiley faltered in her hitherto unflagging impulse to write and decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read one hundred of them, from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, and Alice Munro.
This volume is mostly about contemporary writers, many of whom have received little sustained attention from critics. For example, William Gass, Charles Johnson, Irving Howe, Susan Minot, Grace Paley, Reynolds Price, Stanley Elkin, and Jane Smiley have been written about in the review pages of newspapers and magazines, but their work has yet to attract significant scholarship.
