Everybody wants a fresh start. Vince Camden, born Martin Hagen, is no different. Vince, the protagonist of Jess Walter’s Citizen Vince, is a member of a witness protection program. Selling doughnuts by day and stolen credit cards by night, Camden is content to live in the uneventful town of Spokane, Washington, until one day, when he catches a glimpse of a debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, the two Presidential candidates at the time. Suddenly, he’s hooked on politics, a topic to which he was previously indifferent. Soon afterward, a dangerous man he remembers from his days before he entered witness protection appears in his small town.
Walter’s novel is about a man fascinated by the politics of the time, but it is by no means a political book. What his book is truly about is redemption: a man seeking to atone for all the wrong he’s done.
Vince lives his life filled with regret about both the way things turned out for him and the way he will continue to live, knowing just how hard it is to change himself. “Maybe you’re just too tired to go on. And maybe that is defeat, in the end… simply giving in. Maybe it’s no worse than going to sleep,” he remarks of Carter, losing both the presidential race and his own will to continue. But Vince doesn’t accept defeat for himself. Instead he continues to make his moral and ethical wrongdoings right. To him, the way to do so is to vote.
A book so politically charged can be dangerously biased. Walter, however, dances along the lines of both parties, remaining refreshingly impartial. Even as he writes a chapter from the perspective of both Reagan and Carter, he favors neither.
Citizen Vince marks the third book I’ve read by Jess Walter. Each time I read a book by him, I’m in awe at the amount of detail and emotion packed into each sentence. Each time I finish a book by him, I doubt I’ll ever be able to read another just as good. Walter’s literary talent is evident in his endings. Vince Camden states that “a book can only end one of two ways: truthfully or artfully. If it ends artfully, then it never feels quite right.” Walter, however, doesn’t quite practice what he preaches. Citizen Vince has an ending that is, in Walter’s own words, “truthfully artful.” However, it’s the combination of the two that makes the ending so perfect.
Citizen Vince is a book that will make any reader really think. Even those uninterested in politics will find something to take from this masterpiece. The overarching lesson that Walter preaches is that redemption is unique to the person. It comes in many forms, but the only path to redemption is acceptance. First, one needs to change himself.
@carolinemoreton