A group of idealists experimenting with ‘the Groupon model of gentrification’ come up against the hard realities of a divided America in an impressive novel
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”.
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