A Changed Man -- Francine Prose

Before this book came out, I had no idea that Francine Prose was actually a well-respected grown-up author.  All I had ever read by her was the book After (which I loved), the YA book about the aftermath of a school shooting (I thought that it was a pretty darned brave book--she could have taken a whole lot of backlash for it, considering that it was more about the majority of kids losing their rights and freedoms because of the actions of a few.  I should re-read that).

A Changed Man is the story of Vincent Nolan, a recently-reformed neo-Nazi who shows up at the headquarters of the World Brotherhood Watch, a human rights foundation run by Meyer Maslow, a Holocaust survivor.  Vincent is looking for a job.  He tells Maslow that he wants to "help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me."  He doesn't mention that when he left ARM (AKA the American Rights Movement or the Aryan Resistance Movement, take your pick), he stole his cousin's truck, his prescription drugs and fifteen hundred dollars.

The story is told from multiple perspectives.  That aspect of the book is what made it work for me.  I ended up liking almost everyone--no one is perfect (Vincent is really struggling to de-program himself, something that he thinks no one else knows, but really everyone else is aware of--it's one of the reasons that Meyer takes him in to begin with), but none of them are rotten, either.  (Well, Roberta, the head of publicity kind of sucks--Vincent doesn't like her because she strikes him as someone who would force their own grandmother to pose in Penthouse if it would get press.  Oh, and Vincent's cousin Raymond is quite the piece of work).

Vincent joined ARM mostly to have a couch to sleep on--and to make things more comfortable for himself while residing in Raymond's living room:

The hate stuff was never what Nolan liked about ARM.  Of course, he agreed that the big bucks weren't going to honest working men like himself, but he was never fully convinced that his tax dollars were being raked in by the eight Jewish bankers who secretly own the Federal Reserve.  Anyway, the ARM guys got steamed if they so much as heard the word hate.  They claimed they didn't hate anyone.  It was just that they loved the white race.  Which was also a problem for Nolan.  Loving a race is hard to ask.  It's hard enough loving a person.  He'd thought he'd loved Margaret, right up until and including the morning when she'd patiently waited till he'd finished moving out of the place, loading the last of his stuff into his truck, and then she got in her UPS van and drove off, smiling and waving.

Raymond--who you finally meet about three-quarters of the way through the book--is the real deal.  He was one of the few characters that I didn't grow to like.  Yuck.

This book doesn't let anyone get off scot-free--she goes after liberals as well as the ultra-right.  Her digs at the non-profit world (especially the fund-raising angle) were dead-on and really funny.  But my favorite bits were the interactions between Vincent and Danny, the teenaged son of one of the WBW employees.

Totally worth reading.