Word: budd
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Disquieting Tributes. Since the first one appeared eight years ago, a generation of book reviewers has ridiculed the Lanny Budd novels. Nothing is easier-sometimes it seems that they are filled with nothing but improbabilities and inconsistencies, with no subtler characterizations than those of a good comic strip. Yet reading the entire 6,237 pages gives the disquieting impression that the trouble with Sinclair's fiction is not that it is improbable, but that too much of it is all too literally true. Nothing in the account of Lanny's dealing with Roosevelt, for example, quite comes...
...portraits of Roosevelt are those of a hero-worshiper, and some of them are as devastating as anything his enemies ever composed. Roosevelt explaining his political strength and his policies to Lanny Budd compares himself to a man driving three horses: "One of these horses is young and wild; that is my New Deal group, backed by organized labor and its sympathizers, the intellectuals; they want to gallop all the time, and I have to put a curb-bit in that horse's mouth. The second is much older, and inclined to be mulish; that is my block...
Socialist Superman. It is impossible to outline the story of the whole series (or even of a single volume) without making it seem ridiculous. The books have to do with the adventures of a Socialist hero named Lanny Budd, the illegitimate son of a Connecticut arms manufacturer, born in Paris and educated in Europe, wealthy, handsome, courageous, sensitive, gifted and a true friend of the workingman...
...Lanny Budd, like Vincent Sheean and John Gunther, meets all the great people of the world; he races about the continent of Europe on secret missions for President Roosevelt, like Harry Hopkins and Robert D. Murphy; he broods about the decay of contemporary civilization, like Henry Adams and Lincoln Steffens; he foresees what is going to happen with uncanny clairvoyance and advises people, especially President Roosevelt, with such telling effect that they come to depend on him for most of their information; he is always on the scene when great events are in the making-in Paris...
...Clear Call Lanny Budd is assigned by Roosevelt to bone up on rockets and jets. This is to prepare him for a visit to Germany to quiz a German scientist (anti-Nazi) on German progress in developing the rocket bomb. Thereafter the episodes are what might be expected: the high moment of almost every Lanny Budd novel is an escape from the Gestapo, or the rescue of someone from a Fascist torture chamber...