With this new title which has just landed in bookstores, Douglas Kennedy continues his portrait of the “disunited” States of America begun last year in Men are afraid of the light. And this time, he has chosen the path of the science fiction novel to shine the spotlight on all the sources of division that are tearing his country apart. The year is 2045. The United States has not existed for nearly 12 years; the East and West Coast states, along with a few central states, are now part of the United Republic. Everything else belongs to the United Confederacy, a territory where Confederate flags happily rub shoulders with crucifixes. Then there is Minneapolis, a neutral zone divided in two since the Secession – a kind of 21st century Berlin. This is where Agent Samantha Stengel must go on a mission to eliminate an enemy target. But caught in the grip of the spy wars between the two nations, she risks losing her life in the name of an ideal she is no longer quite sure she believes in.
Douglas Kennedy demonstrates unprecedented audacity in this novel where he deployed all the inventiveness of which he is capable in order to reflect the social fractures that have undermined the United States for several years. He pushed the thought as far as possible to imagine how the country, in its current situation, could drift to the point of separation. The moment that all changed, he writes, was the year 2016. The year “when the growing divisions within the American population became irreparable”. Where the country elected as president, he says, “a real estate mobster, whose national fame rested on a reality TV show.” If the American writer had clearly revealed his political and social convictions in Men are afraid of the light, he threw himself into And this is how we will live and multiplied the charges against Republican positions – and especially against Donald Trump, whom he did not hesitate to attack directly. On the other hand, everything is not perfect on the other side either, and this is what makes his novel all the more interesting, without a doubt, because he does not idealize any actor on this new world chessboard where citizens find themselves, on both sides, stuck in a system over which they ultimately have no control.
The debate around abortion was at the heart of Douglas Kennedy’s previous novel (Men are afraid of the light) and the writer tackles again in And this is how we will live this particularly divisive subject in the United States these days. It is also the main theme of Mercy Street, the most recent novel by American Jennifer Haigh (published last winter by Gallmeister), which deals with the question through the story of a 40-year-old woman employed in an abortion clinic in Boston. Through her daily life, her choices and her questions, a very interesting social portrait emerges which places the author (whom we discovered with her novel Ce qui gît dans ses entrails, on the exploitation of natural resources) among the most brilliant committed pens of the contemporary American novel.
