A Geography of Secrets

As the diplomats in Graham Greene novels make clear, government middle-managers involved in life-and-death decisions suffer torments all their own, and Reuss has a gift for evoking the existential tensions that give Greene novels their intellectual heft. Reuss brings a few twists to that brand of anti-thriller, too. One's formal: The novel's braided structure alternates between Noel and an unnamed government cartographer investigating his late father's experience as a Foreign Service officer...Another twist is technological: Each chapter includes longitude and latitude coordinates that, keyed into Google Maps, locate the setting of each scene...Reuss is particularly skilled at describing the scrim of spook culture that coats the entire D.C. area, from Alger Hiss' old haunts to the anonymous research hubs littering the landscape, and he convincingly lays out the Heller-esque bureaucracies that seem engineered to squash dissent...Faced with a structure so dehumanizing, Reuss argues, it's no wonder we keep secrets--it's a hobby of sorts, a way of taking the business of being our more human selves elsewhere. --Washington City Paper The strengths of A Geography of Secrets merit serious attention, as does Frederick Reuss. May Geography bring him, and his work, the accolades they deserve. --PopMatters.com A Geography of Secrets is like a latter-day Graham Greene novel--intellectually satisfying, morally serious, and, just as important, compulsively readable. --Gary Krist, author of Extravagance and The White Cascade A thoughtful examination of the value of keeping secrets...the descriptions of Noel's golf game are transcendental. An understated but masterly work for fans of cosmopolitan, contemplative, contemporary prose. --Library Journal