Staff Pick: Two Crime Novels

Staff Picks
April 14, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 12 3 min read

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I’ve been thinking lately that I should be reading more crime fiction. I’ve never been against it—in theory I’m in favor of anything good, regardless of genre, although I’ve never taken to werewolves—but I haven’t actively sought it out.

But since my second novel keeps getting categorized as crime fiction, my illiteracy in the genre that I’ve apparently been shoehorned into has become slightly uncomfortable. “What kind of a book have you written?” people ask.

“Um,” I say, “I guess it’s a sort of literary crime novel?” (I know. Awkward. But if you set out to write literary fiction and end up getting reviewed in Spinetingler Magazine, what are you supposed to call it?)

“Oh!” they say. “Have you read [insert name of high-profile crime writer whom I haven’t read but obviously should have if I’m claiming any sort of association with the genre]?”

The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. For your reading pleasure, two books you might consider reading even if you don’t think you like crime fiction very much:

1.
coverSavages by Don Winslow: I think this book is perhaps best described as a Tarantino film crossed with a prose poem. It’s violent, beautifully written, and experimental, and I’ve never read anything like it. Structurally, it’s a dizzyingly intricate 290 chapters, the first one only two words long (1. “Fuck you.”)

Ben is a brilliant botanist who’s partnered up with his best friend, Chon, to produce and distribute the best pot on the West Coast. Chon, a former Navy SEAL who brought unspeakably high-quality marijuana seeds back from Afghanistan, has a girlfriend named O, but she sleeps with Ben too. Everyone’s in their twenties. The trio lead lives of hedonistic ease in Laguna Beach, until a vicious Mexican cartel arrives on the scene to stage a hostile takeover of the business.

The shifts in perspective are interesting; Winslow shifts back and forth within his central trio and then moves outward, until we’re reading short chapters from the viewpoint of practically every thug who populates the pages. The effect is fragmented, but effective. What I found most startling about this book was Winslow’s willingness to abandon conventional form and slip without warning in and out of a sort of loose poetry—

Slicing through SoCal
Cutting through a California night
The freeway (5) is soft and warm and
Welcoming
But for Ben
The green exit signs are like steps climbing up a scaffold
Toward O.

The cartel kidnaps O to speed up the takeover negotiations. The body count is considerable. The book’s practically impossible to put down.

2.
coverSnowdrops by A.D. Miller: Snowdrops is as quiet as Savages is loud. The book opens with the early-spring discovery of a body; a snowdrop, in Moscow slang, a corpse hidden all winter under heavy snows. It appears with the first thaw in front of Nick Platt’s apartment building.

It’s apparent from the first pages that a complicated crime is being played out, something slow and deadly unfolding over weeks and months; evidence of it is all around us even as we can’t see how the pieces fit together—until, of course, the trap snaps shut in the final chapters and the significance of the body in the first chapter falls devastatingly into place.

Nick Platt is a British lawyer who lives and works in Moscow in the early 2000s. One day in the Metro he meets a young woman, Masha, and quickly falls in love. His narration takes the loose form of a confession to his soon-to-be-bride, years later—“You’ve wanted to know why I haven’t talked to you about Russia”—although the deeper he goes into the story, the less certain the wedding seems.

Masha asks for his assistance in helping her aunt, Tatiana, move to a new apartment. The real story here isn’t the crime; it’s the extent to which we’re willing to lie to ourselves, to ignore the obvious, in pursuit of happiness or companionship or love. A lonely man in a foreign city, courted suddenly by a beautiful young girl, is willing to suspend disbelief even when her story begins to crumble and lies start showing through, even when he’s half-aware at every turn that he’s complicit in something dreadful and that everything is wrong. An intriguing debut, suffused with an atmosphere of dread.

is a staff writer for The Millions. Her most recent novel, Station Eleven, was a 2014 National Book Awards finalist. She is married and lives in Brooklyn. www.emilymandel.com.

Staff Picks

How the Brain Forgets: On Penelope Farmer’s ‘Charlotte Sometimes’

Staff Picks
August 31, 2015 | 2 books mentioned 5 min read

There’s a scene in Inside Out, the new Pixar movie about the inner life of a young girl, that illustrates how the brain forgets. In Pixar’s rendering of the brain’s interior, memories are stored in brightly colored globes. When a memory begins to weaken, its color fades and eventually turns gray. Then a cleaning crew comes in to expunge the grayest globes, paying no heed to the memory contained within, even if it is important or interesting. It’s a funny visual of “use it or lose it,” that sad fact of human memory.

Watching that scene, I thought, of course, of all the times I’ve had to click the Did you forget your password? link. Then I thought of all the books I read as a child, especially the “chapter books” I read in elementary and middle school. They seem more lost, somehow, than the books I read in my teens and early-20s. The premises and characters of these books I may have forgotten, but their titles and authors I can still recall. But the books I read from ages nine to 12 are different. During those years, I consumed books the way a child does: quickly and without discernment. I don’t even remember having strong opinions about them. It was as if the things I read were just a passing landscape — what would be the point of saying I liked one landscape better than another? I knew I would never go down that particular road again.

This is a long way of saying that I recently happened upon one of these landscapes. For years, I’ve had a very, very dim memory of having read a book about a girl who time travels while she sleeps. But that was all I could remember. I had no author or title, no idea of the cover or the year it was written. I wasn’t even sure if it was a book. Sometimes I would ask people if they remembered reading or watching such a story. No luck. Oh well, I thought. It probably wasn’t a very good book, anyway.

Happily, I was wrong. The book is good, really good. I discovered it while browsing The New York Review’s online catalog of children’s books. I was looking for a gift for my 10-year-old niece, and I read a novel synopsis that sounded very much like my dim memory: Charlotte Sometimes, by Penelope Farmer. You might recognize the title from The Cure whose 1981 single “Charlotte Sometimes” was inspired by Farmer’s book. (Charlotte Sometimes was first published in 1969, when Robert Smith would have been 10.) After re-reading it, I thought, yeah, I can see why this novel inspired The Cure. It’s a somewhat gloomy book, an eerie story about childhood, identity, loneliness, and death.

At the same time, it has all the pleasures of a good time-travel yarn. The premise is simple: a girl, Charlotte Makepeace, arrives at boarding school, falls asleep in her new dormitory, and wakes up in the same dormitory bed, only it’s 1918, 40 years earlier. There’s a war going on and her classmates are completely different. Everyone calls her “Clare.” The next morning, Charlotte wakes up to find that she’s back in her own time. The next morning, she’s back in 1918. After a few days of going back and forth between the past and present, Charlotte realizes that she’s switching places with Clare. She and Clare begin to leave notes to help each other cope. Because Charlotte is the new girl, and no one knows her, hardly anyone notices that Clare is taking her place. But Clare’s sister, Emily, immediately realizes that Charlotte is an impersonator, and demands to know what is going on. Charlotte doesn’t know. The best she can guess is that it has something to do with the bed that she and Clare share.

Charlotte is right about the bed; disaster strikes when Charlotte, during one of her 1918 visits, is moved out of the dormitory and into a new bed. Without the magic bed, Charlotte can’t get back to her time. She’s terrified, and at the same time a little relieved to have a break from her nightly commutes, which leave her reeling at the beginning of each day as she tries to catch up on what she missed during the previous day. One of the things I liked about the book as an adult (and probably also as a child) was how faithful the novel is to Charlotte’s point of view. Not only do we never hear from any other character, including Clare, (who is presumably dealing with her own confusion in 1958), the book also doesn’t spend a lot of time dealing with the logistics of time travel or the differences between life in 1958 and 1918. Instead, the book focuses on Charlotte’s precarious sense of identity as she shifts between being herself and impersonating Clare:

And she thought, uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel, like Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that?

Later, after being stuck in Clare’s time for many weeks, Charlotte’s sense of self begins to weaken even more:

Charlotte began to dream she was fighting to stay as Charlotte, and one night woke from such a dream struggling, even crying a little. When she was calm again, she did not feel sleepy at all, so she lay still, carefully and deliberately making herself remember Aviary Hall, object by object, room by room. Also she made herself remember things that had happened to her there, as Charlotte, but it was alarming how the details seemed to slip away from her. Even when she tried to conjure up her sister Emma’s face, she kept on seeing Emily’s.

Adolescence is all about forging an identity, and this novel speaks to those questions of “who am I?” and “how do other people see me?” in an abstract, haunting way. Even as an adult, I occasionally wonder what kind of person I would be had I grown up in a different era. For me this question is a feminist one, since my identity would have been limited in certain ways had I been born 40 years earlier. Charlotte Sometimes doesn’t have a feminist agenda, yet it does give a rare portrait of the lives of girls and women during wartime. It also shows how the past can live on in the present. One of the central mysteries of the novel is how Clare and Charlotte are connected across time and why they are able to switch places. I won’t spoil it here except to say that I found the ending very satisfying, and even though I had no specific memory of it, it’s probably the reason that the book stuck with me for all these years.

For those of you with middle-grade children, I recommend Charlotte Sometimes wholeheartedly, and for those of you who may have read it as a child, I recommend returning to it, if only because rereading is one of the only forms of time travel available to us. One of the surprising joys of reading picture books to my toddler son is glimpsing an illustration or reading aloud a phrase that suddenly registers as familiar and beloved. What seems forgotten is only waiting to be rediscovered.

Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 5 min read
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Staff Picks

Staff Picks: Brooks, Richler, Snow, Codrescu, Waller

Staff Picks
June 23, 2009 | 2 books mentioned 4 min read

The “staff picks” shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, these books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many former (and current) booksellers in our ranks, we offer our own “Staff Picks” in a feature appearing irregularly.The Moves Make the Man by Bruce Brooks recommended by GarthIt’s been a long time since I read this 1984 coming-of-age novel, but its indelible images – the green glass of Mello Yello bottles, the soggy crackers used to make home-ec mock-apple pie, the railroad lantern by whose light the protagonists play night games of pickup basketball – remain seared into my memory. Author Bruce Brooks, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, combines descriptive mastery with the kind of compassion that can’t be taught. His story of an unlikely friendship also complicates some of our cherished myths about race and privilege. Though The Moves Make the Man, a Newbery Honor winner, might be slotted into young adult and sportswriting and Southern lit categories, it is no more a niche work than The Bluest Eye, or A Fan’s Notes, or To Kill a Mockingbird, in whose illustrious company it belongs.Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler recommended by AndrewRichler’s final novel, Barney’s Version is a savagely funny piece of satire. It’s also quite moving as it sweeps you through one man’s life. Frank and cantankerous, Barney Panofsky lays bare his failed marriages, his work, and his possible crimes and misdemeanors. Somewhat unreliable as a narrator, Barney’s memories are annotated by his son Michael, who provides clarification and correction to his father’s version of events. Whenever I hear that a film adaptation of a beloved novel is in the works, I usually brace myself for disappointment, but with Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman signed on to play the principal roles, I’m actually looking forward to this one.The Strangers and Brothers series by C. P. Snow recommended by LydiaThis sequence of novels, beginning with A Time of Hope, takes place in England from World War One to the sixties. I haven’t actually finished the series; I’ve only gotten through four out of a possible eleven. I’m a finisher, though, with the exception of Moby Dick on tape, The Alexandria Quartet, and Ulysses (fucking Ulysses, actually), so I am hoping for a completion date sometime before the autumn of my years.I was overjoyed to learn of the existence of these books. I love novel series, and it is my dream to find another Dance to the Music of Time. Or at least a Forsyte Saga. Or at the absolute least, the one with the cave bears. As it happens, C. P. Snow sits somewhere on the spectrum between Powell and Auel. The books are not nearly so delightful as Dance to the Music of Time, but I am nevertheless enjoying them quite a bit. They relate the life of a middle-class man of limited means, who rises to great heights in several professions. It’s a good chronicle of several English epochs and the attitudes found therein. The subject matter is not always riveting, but the books are quite readable. I realize that this doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, but most of the books I love have already been ringing-ly endorsed by someone else, and these are a step or two off the beaten path. So this is me, endorsing.The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu recommended by AnneDada wisdom, divined by Andrei Codrescu and dispersed throughout this guide includes: take a pseudonym (or many); embrace spam email as a form of cut-up poetry; and remember that “the only viable Dada is the banished Dada.” Codrescu posits with wit that as creatures of the digital age, whose lives are beholden to IMs, email, iPhones, Google, and Facebook, we have entered a posthuman era where employing Dada’s nonsense actually makes sense. Beginning with an imagined chess game in 1916 Zurich between Dada founder and poet Tristan Tzara and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Codrescu traces Dada from its nascence to show how Tzara and his rabble-rousers usurped and altered the course of twentieth-century thought. Dada resists meaning and revels in absurdity, and Codrescu would be the first to acknowledge this book doesn’t provide a list of how-to’s but rather resembles a nautical map that charts the currents of our times. “It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life,” Codrescu warns. And for that reason alone, you just might want to try it.The Magnificent Mrs. Tennant by David Waller recommended by EmilyHow delightful to find a learned book that wears its scholarliness lightly: David Waller’s lovely new biography of the Victorian grande dame and salonniere Gertrude Tennant is such a book. Because the magnificent subject of Waller’s book lived from the end of the age of Jane Austen through the First World War, and lived both in France and in England, her biography offers a sort of intimate history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – its personalities and intellectual and cultural history. The famous and controversial explorer Henry Morton Stanley attended Mrs. Tennant’s salons (the horrors of his expeditions to Africa are thought to have been among Conrad’s models for Heart of Darkness), as did Labor Prime Minister William Gladstone, the famous Victorian painter John Everett Millais, and literary luminaries like Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Robert Browning, and Ivan Turgenev.Her acquaintance was a motley of all the aesthetic and intellectual trends of the age: Imperialist explorers, socialists, anarchists, ex-emperors, Romantic and realist novelists, mediums and experts in telepathy all passed through Mrs. Tennant’s drawing room. Her allure as a biographical subject, however, is not limited to her extensive acquaintance: Tennant’s ability to balance her absolute commitments to her husband and children with her gifts for friendship and graciousness and her interest in social and cultural life reveal a more nuanced view of the age, and of the possibilities available to Victorian women. Tennant was a cosmopolitan, a woman of the world, and “an angel in the house” (as the Victorian ideal of wifely and motherly virtue came to be known). Waller trusts Tennant to express herself; he quotes extensively from her diaries and letters. Her voice is earnest, warm, unpretentious, intelligent, loving. You will be glad to have met her. And you will see, through her life, a more refined view of English nineteenth century social and intellectual history.

Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 4 min read
Staff Picks

Staff Pick: John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead

Staff Picks
January 11, 2012 | 2 books mentioned 16 3 min read

Mushy book reviews may be a breach of faith, as the late Wilfrid Sheed maintained, but in this case I can’t help myself. Every word I say or write about John Jeremiah Sullivan’s collection of essays, Pulphead, turns instantly to mush. Yes, he’s that good. He has that rare ability to make me care deeply about things that held little or no interest before I picked up the book, including Christian rock festivals, the very real unreality of reality TV, the last surviving Southern Agrarian, Native-American cave paintings, Michael Jackson, country blues, Axl Rose, the Tea Party, and how to kill a frog and cook its legs. Sullivan has a vast range, obviously, but his success comes from something much deeper and subtler.

The book’s opening essay, “Upon This Rock,” is a good place to begin illustrating the point. The essay tells the story of what happens to Sullivan at the biggest Christian rock festival in all of Christendom, the Creation Festival, “a veritable Godstock” held every year in rural Pennsylvania. Many reporters, wise to the ways of the world, would have helicoptered in from the coast and delivered yet another predictable let’s-laugh-at-the-Clampetts bulletin from the hinterlands. Not Sullivan. He’s too smart and too honest to go this lazy route. He’s above being above his subjects. Instead, he opens his eyes and his heart to the people who have come to the festival, particularly a group of guys from West Virginia he falls in with – Darius, Jake, Ritter, Bub, Josh, and Pee Wee. Sullivan’s empathy is made easier, he notes, by the fact that he was born in Kentucky and as a teenager went through his own “Jesus phase,” which ended when he started reading books that “didn’t jibe with the Bible” and caused him to question his faith. Books will do that to you. Yet Sullivan admits that he still loves Jesus Christ. “His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness,” Sullivan writes. “Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers – there lies sanity. And salvation.”

Sullivan uses such bits of personal history to great advantage in his reporting and writing. Once we know about his “Jesus phase” – and his subsequent loss of faith, and his unwillingness to dismiss believers as fools – we see the thousands of people at the Creation Festival with fresh eyes. Such insights could come only from someone who has done the reporting and has an eye for something that lives way deeper than the much-ballyhooed “telling detail,” way down in the darker sediments of the American soul. Here’s Sullivan’s description of something he didn’t witness at the Creation Festival: “I’ve been to a lot of huge public events in this country during the past five years, writing about sports or whatever, and one thing they all had in common was this weird complicit enmity that American males, in particular, seem to carry around with them much of the time. Call it a laughable generalization, fine, but if you spend enough late afternoons in stadium concourses, you feel it, something darker than machismo. Something  a little wounded, and a little sneering, and just plain ready for bad things to happen.”

It addition to such gem-like observations, Sullivan gives us humor. Here’s his description of the 29-foot whale of a rented RV he drove to the festival: “The interior smelled of spoiled vacations and amateur porn shoots wrapped in motel shower curtains and left in the sun.” Here’s a cute country girl: “Her face was as sweet as a birthday cake beneath spray-hardened bangs.” Here’s delicious food: “She made rum cakes you could eat yourself to death on like a goldfish.” And here’s what he hears: “There was music that sounded like a rabbit’s heartbeat in the core of your brain.”

Sometimes the humor comes with wisdom, as in this verdict on the meaning of an entertainment phenomenon that started way back in the Paleolithic 1990s and long ago went kudzu: “My God, there have been more tears shed on reality TV than by all the war widows in the world. Are we so raw? It must be so. There are simply too many of them – too many shows and too many people on the shows – for them not to be revealing something endemic. This is us, a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.”

Yes, this is indeed us. Is it any wonder I go all mushy when I read this guy?

Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 16 3 min read

12 comments:

  1. i just got into literary mysteries thanks to “Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer” by Wesley Stace. I never knew the genre could be so satisfying. These look great. You make a strong case for “Savages”

  2. Great post. I came across “Savages” thanks to its inclusion in the Tournament of Books this year and also found it hard to put down. I’ve checked out a couple of Winslow’s older books from the library and hope they end up similarly satisfying.

    I used to read a good bit of not-so-literary crime fiction in my teenage years thanks to the sorts of books my dad would read a lot and pass on to me, but I grew away from the genre as my tastes turned a bit more literary the past couple years. Books such as Savages, though, have drawn me a bit back into the genre, and I even find a great deal of entertainment in cozier mystery series such as the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series that aren’t necessarily the brainiest or most challenging, but at the same time don’t patronize the reader.

  4. Thanks for reinforcing my wanting to read Savages, and for putting Snowdrops on my list. I have two thoughts to extend what you said.

    Could much of what is called literary crime fiction be better called literate crime fiction? Literate meaning it doesn’t patronize the reader, insult the language, or strain credibility. It doesn’t have to be on the bleeding edge of what it means to be human, or reconstruct how we tell stories, to justify itself. The literate telling of a good story, about bad people, good people, and some who blur the boundary, is justification enough; calling Rankin, McDermid, Connelly, Mosley, Minna, or Mankell writers of literate crime fiction is sufficient praise for now.

    A useful distinction others have made is between crime fiction and noir fiction. In crime fiction, the crime upsets the moral order; in the end, the crime is solved and the order restored. In noir, no absolute moral order is recognized, and the partial demands of society, family, and the individual will fight for dominance. The Singer’s Gun seems to me to be more noir-ish than crime-ish, but still literary.

  5. Emily,
    Thanks for the heads-up on the latest from Don Winslow. Your mention of the weed-growing botanists reminds me of the only Winslow I’ve read, “California Fire and Life,” which is about sleazebags who set arson fires and the people who try to catch them. Terrific stuff. And it reminded me that the best novels are rarely about people stewing in their juices; they’re almost always about people who do actual work. I’m thinking about wheat-threshing in “Anna Karenina,” bomb de-fusing in “The English Patient,” glove-making in “American Pastoral,” to name just a few.
    Bill Morris

  6. I can’t wait to read Savages. It sounds a bit like the novel Baked, Mark Haskell Smith’s pot-crime-romp through LA, which is a super fun read.

  7. One of the most compelling crime thrillers that I have read is Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. Winslow used to be a DEA guy but left in disgust and then wrote Power of the Dog about the Mexican drug wars. This was in the nineties! When I read it a couple of years ago I thought one of the scenes was a bit too much…but then the next week, in the news, the exact same scenario was reported! This guy has seen it all.

  8. I love crime novels in general – right now I’m finishing Breeders by Barney Rostaing, and I like it a lot. You made “Savages” sound like an absolute must-read, so I think I’ll pick up a copy as soon as I’m done with Breeders!

  9. “The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. ”
    I couldn’t agree more – assigning labels can sometimes have the unintended effect of missing out on a great book or a great experience. Thanks for these two recommendations, I have added them to my summer reading list. Have you read Skylights and Screen Doors by Dean Smart? I would define it as un-categorizable as it is part memoir, part true crime, part just great writing. Another example of how genres can be misleading.

  12. These days crime fiction is the only stuff I read. Thanks for the reccomendations. I will look out for both Snowdrops and savages.

    I have had enouogh of reading the ‘classics’ to impress others and ‘improve myself’.
    I want my daily adrenalin rush and the only way is through crime fiction!

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Staff Picks

Staff Pick: The Real State of America Atlas

Staff Picks
July 26, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 2 4 min read

If you’re thinking about taking a road trip in America this summer, you might want to consider leaving the GPS and the Rand McNally at home and, in their place, packing a bewitching new book called The Real State of America Atlas: Mapping the Myths and Truths of the United States by Cynthia Enloe and Joni Seager.  While it won’t help you negotiate those ring-shaped parking lots around Atlanta or Washington, D.C., this idiosyncratic travel guide will reveal how life is lived today in any state you happen to pass through.  By the time you finish digesting the book’s short essays, colorful graphics, charts and maps, you’ll understand that the 50 states were not created equal.  Geography does matter. Enormously.

As its subtitle suggests, the book’s authors set out to strip away the popular myths that distort many Americans’ view of their homeland and its place in the world. The authors accomplished this by analyzing a small mountain of data, including U.S. Census reports, the findings of prisoner rights research groups, the United Nations, the Pew Foundation and organizations monitoring college athletics, plus Bureau of Labor statistics and corporate annual reports. They then synthesized this data to produce a series of vivid snapshots about America’s distribution of wealth, religious attitudes, employment, home ownership and homelessness, sickness and health, prisons, immigration, gun ownership, environmental degradation, corporate power, military spending, and even the worldwide popularity of the Barbie doll.  (She’s huge in Italy and the United Kingdom.)

The findings are by turns surprising, predictable, frightening, encouraging, amusing, and maddening.  For instance, we learn again and again that Texas is a state of extremes: it has executed the most people since 1976 (463); it has the highest percentage of hunters (Pennsylvania ranks second); it has sacrificed more of its citizens to the Iraq War than any other state except California (414 to 468, with Pennsylvania a distant third at 195); it has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance (26 percent); and it has a gross domestic product equal to Russia’s.

While such facts are interesting in themselves and valuable for the global perspective they provide, they are not this book’s greatest strength. Where The Real State of America Atlas truly shines is in its demolition of the notion – the enduring fantasy – that America is a land of equal opportunity, a place where boundless bounty awaits anyone who is willing to work hard and play by the rules.  With a relentless parade of statistics, the authors make a compelling case that the playing field is far from level and the American Dream is, increasingly, becoming the destiny of the privileged few as it slips beyond the reach of most members of the middle class.  Forget about the poor.

Consider these numbers: there are 413 billionaires in America with a combined net worth of $1.4 trillion; the richest 1 percent of Americans own 35 percent of the total wealth; the poorest 40 percent own 0.2 percent of the wealth; 19 percent of American households have zero or negative wealth.  “Almost a fifth of American households have an annual income of less than $20,000,” the authors write, “and 15 percent of Americans live at or below official poverty levels… The wealth gap in the U.S. is considerable and growing fast.” Yet even as the federal budget went from a $236 billion surplus to a $1.5 trillion deficit in the past decade, many lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, insist that continued tax breaks for the rich are vital for the country. The super-rich aren’t the only culprits in our looming national debt crisis. More than half of the foreign companies and 42 percent of U.S. companies doing business on American soil paid zero federal income tax for two or more years between 1998 and 2005. In 2009, General Electric, Bank of America, and CitiGroup paid exactly nothing. Only in America.

Sometimes the book’s statistics merely buttress the obvious – Americans are religious, they own a lot of guns, they love sports and cars, they’re increasingly conservative and insanely overweight, they’re not much interested in what’s happening beyond their national borders, and, for a people descended largely from immigrants, they’re oddly suspicious and resentful of recent immigrants. That said, the authors do sometimes counter well-known facts with counter-intuitive anecdotes, such as the revelation that for all the God-fearing that goes on in America, the number of atheists and agnostics has doubled, from 8 to 16 percent of the population, in the past 30 years.

It’s worth pausing here to consider the authors’ bona fides. Cynthia Enloe is a political science professor at Clark University and the author of 11 books, including The Curious Feminist and Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War.  Joni Seager, a geographer and global policy expert, teaches at Bentley University in Boston and has written many books, including four editions of Atlas of Women in the World.  Given such credentials, it’s perhaps not surprising that the authors occasionally leave themselves open to the criticism that they’re promoting a leftist, feminist agenda. Worse, they sometimes slip into muzzy writing, such as: “Despite a long history of peace activism, many Americans have absorbed militaristic ideas: for instance, believing that soldiering is the highest form of patriotism, that the world is full of enemies, that protecting against terrorists trumps civil rights, that men are the natural protectors of women, that jet bombers overhead make sporting events exciting, and that Commander-in-Chief is the President’s most important job.” No doubt many Americans do believe these things. Just as surely, many don’t believe them. But how many? And what do these competing beliefs tell us about the nation at large? Unfortunately, the authors don’t say.

But such missteps don’t diminish this book’s real and valuable achievements.  Enloe and Seager have produced a timely reminder that America is a place where the deck is stacked, where the rich keep getting richer, and where nothing is going to change until the members of the great, duped, sinking middle class wake up and realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods.

Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 2 4 min read
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