Traces the experiences of protagonists from a range of cultures, including a blacklisted Hollywood actor who struggles to connect with his son, and a dissenting gallery worker who begins smuggling and curating underground art.

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names.” Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude. Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.

This novel is the story of a group of American writers, many of them highly-paid journalists, commentators, film and radio celebrities, and how they reacted to congressional investigations of their backgrounds, their loyalties and their work. Francis Xavier Lang and Ben Blau were idealists who had fought in Spain on the loyalist side. The rich successful woman-loving Lang, softened by years of hard drinking and dissipation, found persecution and the threatened loss of his profitable radio programme too much to take. It was not enough publicly to disavow what he had formerly believed. To survive the witch-hunt he had to give names and so he found himself in court facing his old comrade-in-arms Ben Blau.--From publisher description.