I read this book several years ago and came across it at the library and decided to read it again. The Company You Keep is a book that I surprisingly enjoy. I say surprisingly because I am someone who likes a believeable story. I also like my fact to be fact and my fiction to be fiction. This book crosses some lines on these two points.
Neil Gordon constructs this book as a series of e-mails from different members of “The Committee” who were members of the Weatherman during the Vietnam War or in some how related to this group. The e-mails are being sent to the main character’s, Jim Grant’s, daughter, Isabel. She is 17 and lives in England and they are asking her to come back to the United States in June of 2006 to testify at a parole hearing. In their request for this they are taking turns describing what happened the summer of 1996 when Isabel was deserted in a hotel room in Manhatten by her father. My initial problem was that these lengthy chapters could be e-mails…I’ve never known anyone to e-mail like that. Yet this was an interesting way of setting up a structure to hear different sides of the story, and it did work for that purpose.
I learned a lot in this book about the Weatherman or the Weather Underground, as some of the members became known after they had to go underground to hide their identities after a townhouse bombing accident in 1970. Some of the historical information in this book I know is true. Mainly because the topic of this book interested me enough that I did do some research and learn about the Weatherman. However some of the people in the book are not real people including the main character. I find myself getting a little caught up in this and wanting to check what people and events are real, but when I started to relax and just read I truly enjoyed how much Neil Gordon was able to get into the history, the feeling of the times, and what it would be like to give up an identity in place for another.
There was one exchange on page 204 of the book (which I imagine led to the naming of the book) that touched a cord with me and I feel is probably true today with politics. The FBI agent who had gone undercover in the 70s to investigate the Weatherman says that “Where you fell on the question of VIetnam…didn’t depend on what you believed.” When the reporter asked him what he meant he replied, “Where you fell on the question of Vietnam depended on the company you kept, nothing more, nothing less. YOur friends went, your neighbors went, your family went–then you went too.”
That was something I could understand. The book stressed that the changing of times… it being 1996 or 2006 instead of the period of the Vietnam War changed the way a crime could be looked at. I was excited to be reading about characters whose passion about their beliefs and causes you could feel.
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