Towards the end of Benjamin Markovits’s impressive new novel, the narrator has an argument with his brother about how people want to live. By “people” they mean Americans, but perhaps their myopia can be forgiven, coming as they do from a nation formed from beliefs about how people want to live. The 34-year-old narrator, Greg Marnier or Marney, has, as part of a social experiment, moved to a semi-derelict neighbourhood in Detroit. His brother, a lawyer in Houston, works incessantly to pay for his kids’ private schools and finds nothing more delicious than the prospect of an afternoon of golf. People “want to make money”, the brother insists, “and they want to make more money than their neighbour does. That’s how they know that they’re winning.”
This is the story of Marney’s efforts to figure out an alternative, a long process of elimination in which he searches for how he does have to live. “There should be a better test of who I am than middle-class American life,” he thinks. Marney’s quest – if an effort so desultory and inertia-plagued can be called that – takes him on a meandering path, from his childhood home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, through Yale, Oxford and a dead-end teaching gig in “some Podunk college in Wales”. And finally it brings him to Detroit, where one of those college buddies is engineering “the Groupon model of gentrification”.
The college buddy is Robert James: handsome (his campus nickname was “the Greek God”) and flush with hi-tech and hedge-fund wealth. “It’s not very hard to make money,” he tells Marney. “You just need to be able to work out what two percent is.” Robert plays Jay Gatsby to Marney’s Nick Carraway, but the social circles Robert is trying to infiltrate aren’t the mansions of Long Island’s old money. Instead, he has “backseat political ambitions” and wants to impress the movers and shakers in Barack Obama’s new administration.
He aims to be one of a new breed of rich men who turn not to philanthropy but to mediagenic projects designed to revitalise US society, while still making money. He speaks a mixed language: partly Silicon Valley’s hubristic patter of total transformation, partly free-market evangelism, all of it infused with the conviction that technology and capitalism can magically erase the past and construct a streamlined future. “The idea behind the whole place,” Robert explains to an interviewer, “is that we wanted to take a virtual community and make it real.” On the ground, this entails buying up blocks in Detroit and populating the houses with people who promise to fix things up in exchange for cheap rent.
Markovits builds this novel out of straight-plank prose, its lines and structure as pleasingly solid and clean as those of a Shaker chair. And in the Detroit neighbourhood locals take to calling New Jamestown, Marney’s block fills up with a diverse bunch of families: libertarians as well as lefties, Mexicans, Jews, gay couples, single parents and, most importantly, black people. (Detroit, as everyone keeps reminding Marney, is a black city.) “People helped each other out,” Marney relates. “We had time and didn’t need much money.” A guy named Joe opens up a cafe in his living room and front yard, and it becomes a hangout. Someone else turns a stretch of vacant land into an urban farm. Marney, trained as a historian, starts writing a local newsletter with profiles of the newcomers. The man who moves in next door describes their burgeoning community as “settlers”. Robert compares them to the Pilgrims.
Although colonial America is one of Marney’s areas of expertise, he shares with a lot of his countrymen a tendency to ignore the less inspirational facets of his nation’s past. Detroit, like America in the 1600s, is far from empty when the would-be settlers arrive. On Marney’s block, there’s Eleanor Smith, a resident of 47 years, and her son Nolan, a divorced dad, who makes his resentment of the New Jamestown crowd abundantly clear. “I should tell you right now I consider this occupied territory,” he says when Marney shows up to interview him. He threatens to take a baseball bat to the windows of a house when workmen come by to explain that they need to shut down the street’s electricity for a couple of hours. Nolan is Markovits’s great creation here: full of justified yet self-destructive rage and a stubborn refusal to bulldoze the past everyone else is so eager to leave behind.
In truth, the all-new thing Markovits’s characters try to build in Detroit, like most colonial enterprises, is the shadow of some old thing. Even Robert is nostalgic, drawing his Yalie pals into the project because, as he sees it, “college is really the only time … that most of us get to live in the kind of small-town community that we still associate with the founding of this country”.
Not surprisingly, it’s the persistent, inescapable factor of race that drives the deepest cracks into the foundations of New Jamestown. Obama himself arrives for a political fundraiser, and during the afterparty, an ambiguous incident in which a black youth steals an iPhone and a white driver knocks him off his bicycle becomes the sort of litmus test of racial attitudes that is all too familiar in today’s America.
By that point, Marney is dating a black woman, a teacher and old-time Detroiter, and has even befriended Nolan, but the part of him that has always felt like an outsider keeps insisting he doesn’t have to pick sides, refusing to see that abstaining amounts to choosing a side by default. In the final, masterfully executed incident of the novel, his cherished neutrality blows up in his face. Perhaps Markovits’s fictional Obama, who makes the speech that gives the novel its title, is right that Americans don’t have to live “like this”, divided and distrustful, but it will take more than cheap real estate and internet utopianism to make change possible.
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