It’s so crazy that it might just work: a group of Yale-graduates, faced with the depressing job prospects that their fancy and expensive degrees have earned them, embark on a gentrification project in Detroit. Their radical solution? Convince a (mostly black) population of homeowners to sell up, and, in their place, install a few hundred carefully selected “pioneers”.
This is the premise of Benjamin Markovits’ most recent book: part utopian parable about socialism and starting over, part shrewd cautionary tale about capitalism, urban decay and race relations in the United States. But especially, that the past is never very far behind.
And though it’s fiction, it comes at a time in real-life history when the fading lustre of the American dream – and indeed, the American empire – is felt with particular acuteness. The book is populated with characters typifying a generation of people whose heretofore-unmatched sense of entitlement is met with a profound and nagging sense of impending existential anti-climax.
Take for example, our narrator Greg ‘Marny’ Marnier, a self-described ‘academic drifter’. As a historian – with a specialisation in American colonial history, no less – Marny is a uniquely qualified vehicle to make sense of this caper, knowing as he should that the past is the precedent. He is also the American everyman, who despite hitting all the appropriate markers, can’t seem to stick with anything. In this way, Marny comes to stand in for every white disaffected male in the United States, enjoying enough privilege to experience a deep and uncomfortable yearning for something more, but not enough to realise those aspirations. Enter: the deeply repressed impotent rage manifested as inertia. And though the ‘this’ of the book’s title ostensibly refers to a rousing speech by a fictional President Barak Obama congratulating the group on their pioneering spirit, by the end it’s unclear if it’s the lives they left behind, or the Detroit ‘this’ – the one they created from scratch – that’s more problematic.
What would be bleak in less thoughtful hands is a serious yet playful rumination on the act of starting over, the decline of the all-powerful American empire and the ways in which some things just can’t change. And yet despite this prognosis, the theme of redemption runs profoundly through the story; Marny seeks out his own kind of redemption, using his Yale and Oxford educated mores on the frontier of the American dream, and there is a pervasive sense of optimism even amid the ashes of the once-great city of Detroit. In covering such rich thematic terrain, this book is both ambitious and satisfying.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
You Don’t Have to Live Like This
By Benjamin Markovits
Published by Faber August 2015
