Harvey Freedenberg

NonfictionSocial Science

An acclaimed critic cuts through the noise

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

When Michiko Kakutani ended her tenure of nearly 35 years as a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic with the New York Times in July 2017, she announced her intention to “focus on longer pieces about politics and culture.” If The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, her fiery takedown of the culture of lies personified by the presidency of Donald Trump is any indication, her voice soon may become as influential in the world of politics as it was in literary culture.

Kakutani covers ground that will be painfully familiar to regular readers of her former paper or the Washington Post. Unlike conventional political commentators, however, she digs deeper to seek out the “roots of falsehood in the Trump era.” It’s here that her immersion in literature provides a fresh perspective on our current dilemma: Kakutani lays some portion of the blame on postmodernism, with its “philosophical repudiation of objectivity,” expressed most clearly in the work of Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionists, who posited that there was “no such thing as truth.”

Though Trump likely isn’t familiar with these literary theories, Kakutani argues that, in coining terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts,” his allies are cynically employing the same notion of subjectivity to advance their political agenda. Aided by the right-wing media and highly effective Russian internet trolls, they’ve capitalized on America’s increasing tribalism and skepticism of traditional sources of expertise, employing “language as a tool to disseminate distrust and discord.”

As she envisions the inevitable post-Trump era, Kakutani is not optimistic. If there’s any hope of recovering from this relentless onslaught of falsehood, it will only come about through the efforts of an engaged citizenry, insistent on respect for our institutions and, above all, for the truth. Some of the critical information to fuel that engagement can be found in these pages.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Michiko Kakutani ended her tenure of nearly 35 years as a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic with the New York Times in July 2017, she announced her intention to “focus on longer pieces about politics and culture.” If The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, her fiery takedown of the culture of lies personified by the presidency of Donald Trump is any indication, her voice soon may become as influential in the world of politics as it was in literary culture.

NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

The ultimate TBR list

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It would be surprising if the reading list of anyone who picks up novelist, critic and professor Francine Prose’s What to Read and Why doesn’t instantly grow exponentially. After considering the 33 essays that compose this deeply informed collection, it’s tempting to ask: Is there anything worth reading that she hasn’t read?

Traversing more than a century and a half of literature, from the works of Dickens, Eliot and Balzac to the recent works of Jennifer Egan, Mohsin Hamid and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Prose’s book offers a generous serving of her wide-ranging literary enthusiasms. And Prose’s favorites aren’t limited to canonical authors. If the names Patrick Hamilton or Elizabeth Taylor (no, not the actress) aren’t familiar, Prose’s accolades may tempt you to seek out their work.

As she revealed in her book Reading Like a Writer, Prose is an evangelist for the painstaking but richly satisfying art of close reading. For her, the most rewarding way of engaging with the best writers’ work is at the level of the sentence. With apt examples, she lavishes praise on Jane Austen for the “grace and wit of her sentences” and the “thrilling attention to the shape of paragraph and sentence” in the work of Rebecca West.

Prose doesn’t confine herself to appraisals of individual authors. Several of the most satisfying essays in this book focus on broader subjects like the uses of art or the difficult task of defining the short story. The essay “On Clarity” is a masterly primer on the art of graceful writing, a gift Prose displays on every page.

What to Read and Why is a collection of love letters to the art of literature. The only impediment to devouring this book is the persistent urge to trade it for the work of one of the writers Prose so avidly praises.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It would be surprising if the reading list of anyone who picks up novelist, critic and professor Francine Prose’s What to Read and Why doesn’t instantly grow exponentially. After considering the 33 essays that compose this deeply informed collection, it’s tempting to ask: Is there anything worth reading that she hasn’t read?

FictionDebut FictionComic Fiction

Lazy liaisons

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The weather isn’t the only thing that’s steamy in Charlottesville, Virginia, in Andrew Martin’s debut novel. Early Work is the smart, if rueful, story of a love triangle, with all the painful fallout that usually attends that particular emotional geometric configuration.

When Peter, the novel’s narrator, glimpses Leslie, it’s a case of lust at first sight. But he faces one towering obstacle if he wants to consummate his desire: For five years he’s been in a relationship with Julia, a medical resident and poet, and sincerely believes they’d “continue to be together for the long, inevitably more complicated, run.” And there’s also the inconvenient fact that Leslie has her own attachment to a fiancé she’s left behind in Texas.

Both aspiring writers, Peter and Leslie aren’t doing much more than toying with works in progress—his a novel he fears will “never cohere into the, what, saga of ice and fire” his friends are imagining, and hers a script she’s being “encouraged,” rather than paid, to write. It seems both are ripe to fall into a summer fling, if only as a source of perceived respite from their unproductive literary efforts.

In Peter’s account—one whose tone alternates between self-lacerating insight and something akin to magical thinking—the desultory relationship doesn’t appear to bring much satisfaction to either character as the tension builds inevitably toward the moment when Julia learns of Peter’s infidelity, a scene that Martin portrays with understated grace.

Early Work isn’t interested in rendering moral judgment on Peter and Leslie’s affair, but it doesn’t shrink from portraying the bleak consequences of the mutual self-absorption that seems to be the driving force in their liaison. Even with that quality of reserve, there’s a lesson to be learned from this quiet novel: Sometimes we’re better off not getting what we want.

The weather isn’t the only thing that’s steamy in Charlottesville, Virginia, in Andrew Martin’s debut novel. Early Work is the smart, if rueful, story of a love triangle, with all the painful fallout that usually attends that particular emotional geometric configuration.

NonfictionBiography

Under the wheels of “progress”

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The grim story Eliza Griswold tells in Amity and Prosperity will seem familiar to readers who know the tale of New York’s Love Canal or have read Jonathan Harr’s prize-winning book A Civil Action. Griswold’s penetrating story explores the consequences of our nation’s ill-advised zeal for exploiting abundant natural resources and features rapacious corporations, inept—if not complicit—regulators and hapless victims in a small Pennsylvania town. Hapless, that is, until they hire an unlikely husband-and-wife legal team to help them seek justice.

Most of the action unfolds in and around the small town of Amity in southwestern Pennsylvania. Beginning in 2010, Griswold made 37 trips to the region to report the story, and she focuses her careful investigation on nurse Stacey Haney and her two children. The Haneys’ farmhouse is located downhill from a pond containing waste products from the process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which is used to extract natural gas from the underlying shale deposit.

The Haneys’ worsening financial and health problems eventually drive them to lawyers John and Kendra Smith, partners in a small, local law firm. Though the Smiths’ dogged efforts in the face of fierce resistance from gas producer Range Resources and other defendants yielded only mixed results for the Haneys and their neighbors, they were able to creatively invoke Pennsylvania’s Environmental Rights Amendment, successfully using it for the first time in an action against polluters.

Griswold’s sobering book is yet one more in a growing roster of works that detail the price some members of American society have been forced to pay to serve the convenience and comfort of their fellow citizens.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The grim story Eliza Griswold tells in Amity and Prosperity will seem familiar to readers who know the tale of New York’s Love Canal or have read Jonathan Harr’s prize-winning book A Civil Action. Griswold’s penetrating story explores the consequences of our nation’s ill-advised zeal for exploiting abundant natural resources and features rapacious corporations, inept—if not complicit—regulators and hapless victims in a small Pennsylvania town. Hapless, that is, until they hire an unlikely husband-and-wife legal team to help them seek justice.

NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

Everybody wants to rule the world

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve) makes no secret of the fact that this compact study of the portrayal of tyrants in the work of William Shakespeare was inspired by his dismay over the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. But even those who don’t share Greenblatt’s political perspective should find his well- informed survey of the making and unmaking of autocratic rulers to be instructive and entertaining.

Tyrant ranges across an ample array of Shakespeare’s dramatic works as Greenblatt explores Shakespeare’s fascination with the “deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?” Describing Shakespeare as a “supreme master of displacement and strategic indirection,” he explains how, by never placing his politically charged stories in a contemporary setting, the playwright was able to deftly illuminate the political struggles of the Elizabethan Age without risking his safety.

Whether Shakespeare was using his plays to expose how a budding tyrant could capitalize on the infighting of political factions to ascend to power, or how another might promote a populism that “look[s] like an embrace of the have-nots” but is “in reality a form of cynical exploitation,” Greenblatt credits the Bard as both an astute observer of the political world and an acute judge of human character. And for all the havoc wreaked by monstrous characters like Macbeth and Richard III, Greenblatt argues, Shakespeare believed in their ultimate doom. Concluding this lively book on an optimistic note, he points to the “political action of ordinary citizens” as the antidote for a threat that will persist as long as there are leaders and people demanding to be led.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve) makes no secret of the fact that this compact study of the portrayal of tyrants in the work of William Shakespeare was inspired by his dismay over the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. But even those who don’t share Greenblatt’s political perspective should find his well- informed survey of the making and unmaking of autocratic rulers to be instructive and entertaining.

FictionLiterary Fiction

As we stumble along

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Stephen McCauley’s bittersweet seventh novel gives the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pronouncement that there are no second acts in American lives. Because for all their missteps, the angst-ridden characters that populate My Ex-Life seem determined, in their endearingly flawed ways, to make the best of their unique circumstances.

Most of the novel’s action unfolds in the slightly shabby seaside resort of Beauport, just north of Boston. It’s home to Julie Fiske and her restless daughter, Mandy, who’s on the cusp of high school graduation. In the midst of a fractious divorce and pressured by her husband to sell the rambling home they once shared, Julie reaches out to her first ex-husband, David Hedges, a college admissions consultant, in a desperate bid to help her daughter and bring order to the chaos of her life. David left Julie three decades earlier after discovering his true sexual orientation, and he now lives in San Francisco, where he faces his own real estate crisis—an impending eviction.

McCauley seasons the novel with a liberal helping of the anxieties of contemporary American life, chief among them upper-middle-class parents’ apprehension about their children’s futures and aging baby boomers’ regret that life’s brass ring will always be just out of reach. He excels in some wickedly funny scenes that depict Julie’s fumbling efforts to turn her home into an economically productive Airbnb, as well as a tender portrayal of the odd sexual tension that bubbles up during Julie and David’s reunion. They’re the sort of people who know their lives possess all the ingredients for happiness, but who seem to have lost the recipe. For all the idiosyncrasies of McCauley’s creations, it’s likely many readers will see aspects of their own lives reflected in these pages.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Stephen McCauley’s bittersweet seventh novel gives the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pronouncement that there are no second acts in American lives. Because for all their missteps, the angst-ridden characters that populate My Ex-Life seem determined, in their endearingly flawed ways, to make the best of their unique circumstances.

NonfictionEssays

Personal devotion and political strife

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Though she’s best known for novels like her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, in recent years Marilynne Robinson has quietly been building an impressive body of nonfiction work. In What Are We Doing Here?, her third collection of essays since 2012, she again discourses with depth and sensitivity on an impressive range of topics in theology, philosophy and contemporary American life.

Save for two undated essays that conclude the volume, all of the pieces comprising the book were written between 2015 and 2017. Many were delivered in the form of lectures at churches or institutions of higher education around the world. As in her last book, The Givenness of Things, Robinson doesn’t flinch from engagement with deep aspects of Christian theology, something that may be a difficulty for more casual readers. An enlightening theme of several pieces is Puritan belief and culture, as she seeks to rescue thinkers like Jonathan Edwards from the stigma of narrow-mindedness traditionally attached to the label of Puritanism.

Robinson is at her most accessible and eloquent when, as a “self-professed liberal,” she focuses her critical eye on prominent aspects of our current political climate. As she explains in “A Proof, a Test, an Instruction,” written a few weeks after the 2016 election, she’s an unabashed admirer of Barack Obama, describing her respect for him as “vast and unshadowed.” The two engaged in a deep and impressively wide-ranging conversation in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 2015, which was later published in The New York Review of Books. She concludes this book with the essay “Slander,” lamenting how her mother, who died at age 92, “lived out the end of her fortunate life in a state of bitterness and panic,” as a result of her obsessive devotion to Fox News. Readers who share Robinson’s strong political views will appreciate how forcefully she defends them in this challenging but worthwhile collection.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Though she’s best known for novels like her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, in recent years Marilynne Robinson has quietly been building an impressive body of nonfiction work. In What Are We Doing Here?, her third collection of essays since 2012, she again discourses with depth and sensitivity on an impressive range of topics in theology, philosophy and contemporary American life.

FictionLiterary FictionComic Fiction

A spiritual satire

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Four years after a veteran of the war in Afghanistan was paralyzed by an IED explosion, he suddenly rises from his wheelchair in the parking lot of a Biloxi, Mississippi, convenience store—and that’s when Jonathan Miles’ smart exploration of everything from the excesses of American popular culture to the deepest aspects of religious belief roars to life.

At first, former high school football star Cameron Harris’ seemingly miraculous recovery sparks bewilderment in his physician, which soon curdles into outright skepticism. And when Cameron and his sister, Tanya, become the stars of a reality TV show called “Miracle Man,” and a Vatican representative arrives to investigate the possibility that Cameron’s recovery may be the second miracle necessary to elevate a deceased archbishop to sainthood, the stakes grow impossibly higher.

As the need to explain Cameron’s sudden recovery becomes more intense, Miles gradually unwraps a secret that has the potential to upend the young man’s newfound celebrity. Whether it’s a terrifying firefight in the snowy mountains of Afghanistan or the fervor that swirls around the Biloxi convenience store as it’s transformed, with the spreading news of Cameron’s “miracle,” into a place that’s like “someone opened a Cracker Barrel at Lourdes,” the novel is a vivid portrait of our need to believe and its unintended consequences.

Miles (Dear American Airlines) cleverly disguises his new novel as a work of investigative reporting, even going so far as to thank his fictional creations in his acknowledgments. For all he does to make the book appear as a work of journalism, Miles doesn’t sacrifice his characters’ inner lives to the demands of his well-orchestrated plot. Anatomy of a Miracle is a thoughtful modern morality play that’s as current as the latest internet meme and as timeless as the foundations of faith.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Four years after a veteran of the war in Afghanistan was paralyzed by an IED explosion, he suddenly rises from his wheelchair in the parking lot of a Biloxi, Mississippi, convenience store—and that’s when Jonathan Miles’ smart exploration of everything from the excesses of American popular culture to the deepest aspects of religious belief roars to life.

NonfictionBiography

An epic, caffeinated quest

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

If something called the American dream is still alive, it’s personified by the protagonist of the captivating The Monk of Mokha, Dave Eggers’ latest work of narrative nonfiction. In it, Eggers marshals the storytelling talent he displayed in Zeitoun, his 2009 account of a Syrian-American family devastated by Hurricane Katrina and inane bureaucracy, to explore the story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young Yemeni American who must overcome civil war, terrorism and his own inexperience and self-doubt to pursue his singular vision of entrepreneurial success in the specialty coffee business.

In 2013, while employed as a doorman at a posh apartment building in San Francisco, 25-year-old Alkhanshali, who’d already demonstrated his superior salesman skills by dealing everything from Banana Republic clothing to Hondas, hatched a plan to revive the coffee business in his ancestral homeland. Eggers explains that although Ethiopia lays claim to the discovery of the coffee fruit, the first beans were brewed in Yemen, giving birth to the coffee known as “arabica.”

Alkhanshali’s audacious business model involved the promotion of the direct trading of rare coffee varietals to premium roasters. Ignoring a State Department travel warning, he left for Yemen amid U.S. drone strikes, the attacks of Houthi rebels and the constant threat of terrorism from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

In the final third of The Monk of Mokha, Eggers, who has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, describes Alkhanshali’s harrowing journey back to America, carrying suitcases packed with coffee beans whose quality he hopes will secure both his business’s future and the prosperity of his farmer clients. It’s a nail-biting account, with each checkpoint and interrogation posing a new peril.

Propelled by its engaging main character and his improbable determination, The Monk of Mokha, for all its foreign elements, is at its heart a satisfying, old-fashioned American success story.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If something called the American dream is still alive, it’s personified by the protagonist of the captivating The Monk of Mokha, Dave Eggers’ latest work of narrative nonfiction. In it, Eggers marshals the storytelling talent he displayed in Zeitoun, his 2009 account of a Syrian-American family devastated by Hurricane Katrina and inane bureaucracy, to explore the story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young Yemeni American who must overcome civil war, terrorism and his own inexperience and self-doubt to pursue his singular vision of entrepreneurial success in the specialty coffee business.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Those who are left behind

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

A school shooting: four dead, six wounded. It’s the stuff of our society’s worst recurring nightmare. And it provides the backdrop for Oliver Loving, Stefan Merrill Block’s moving third novel, the story of one family’s struggle to cope with the devastating aftermath of such a tragedy.

Nearly 10 years after he’s shot in the head at the high school homecoming dance in the small West Texas town of Bliss, Oliver Loving, now 27, lies paralyzed and mute at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility. His parents’ marriage fractured long ago, and his younger brother wrestles with the nearly impossible challenge he’s set for himself: finding the words to tell his brother’s story in a way that will, if only figuratively, bring him back to life. A glimmer of hope that Oliver may be emerging from his locked-in state only thrusts the Lovings deeper into crisis.

Block peels away the layers of concealment, both personal and communal, that have masked the truth about what led Hector Espina Jr., a recent graduate of the high school, to return one otherwise uneventful evening with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and wreak havoc on an entire town. But in contrast to the sensationalism of our ritualized news coverage, this is a ruminative novel whose accumulating emotional force depends on the acuteness of Block’s patient character development and the unassuming grace of his prose.

As periodic eruptions of gun violence surface randomly and inexplicably across our national landscape, it seems the horror of one is barely grasped before the next arrives. For all the intensity of our collective desire to move on from each of these human-inflicted disasters, Oliver Loving soberly reminds us that there are people left behind for whom the grief and pain will never disappear.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A school shooting: four dead, six wounded. It’s the stuff of our society’s worst recurring nightmare. And it provides the backdrop for Oliver Loving, Stefan Merrill Block’s moving third novel, the story of one family’s struggle to cope with the devastating aftermath of such a tragedy.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The godmother of STEM

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The story of our digital age is sadly lacking in its inclusion of prominent women. One notable exception is Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace. The daughter of the iconic poet Lord Byron, Ada played a critical role in shaping public perception of one of the first computing devices: Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. In her richly detailed Enchantress of Numbers, Jennifer Chiaverini presents a vivid portrait of Ada’s too-short life while illuminating the significance of her professional accomplishments.

Narrated in her keenly intelligent voice, Ada’s story is one of conflict between the two sides of her genetic and cultural inheritance: the fiery, artistic temperament of her father, who chafed against polite society’s constraints; and her mother’s desire for order and control, rooted in the conventions of England’s 19th-century nobility. Ada’s true gift is her ability to marry the sensibility of a poet to the keen mind of a scientist.

Enchantress of Numbers expertly balances scenes in royal salons and English country houses with Ada’s reflections on the mathematical principles that helped her push the potential of Babbage’s invention beyond expectations. Chiaverini’s latest will appeal to readers who enjoy 19th-century historical fiction and want a glimpse into the dawn of a technological revolution.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The story of our digital age is sadly lacking in its inclusion of prominent women. One notable exception is Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace. The daughter of the iconic poet Lord Byron, Ada played a critical role in shaping public perception of one of the first computing devices: Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. In her richly detailed Enchantress of Numbers, Jennifer Chiaverini presents a vivid portrait of Ada’s too-short life while illuminating the significance of her professional accomplishments.

NonfictionHistoryArts & Culture

“They tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat”

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

For a people who have experienced centuries of persecution, Jews have managed to find the humor in even their darkest moments. Spanning the breadth of that history, from the Bible to “Seinfeld” and beyond, Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber’s Jewish Comedy: A Serious History is an erudite and entertaining exploration of the multidimensional Jewish comic sensibility, one that plows familiar ground while also unearthing humor in some surprising places.

Dauber delivers an erudite exploration of the Jewish comic sensibility.

Forgoing a chronological approach that would relegate consideration of contemporary Jewish comedy to the concluding chapters, Dauber instead organizes his book around seven themes. They encompass everything from the “bookish, witty, intellectual allusive play” of Jewish humor (think Woody Allen’s films) to its sometimes “vulgar, raunchy and body-obsessed” quality, as in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles or the raw humor of stand-up comedian Sarah Silverman. Jewish comedy has, at times, provided a sort of armor against oppression, while at others it’s served as a means of entry into the wider world.

Readers who identify Jewish comedy solely with the army of brilliant stand-up comedians familiar to American audiences will be impressed by Dauber’s ability to find humor in sources that include the Hebrew Bible’s prophets. For all their passion for social justice, he argues, “satire was among their main weapons.” He’s especially fond of the biblical Book of Esther—what he calls “the great source of Jewish comedy”—so much so that he’s able to connect it to each of his seven themes. It’s the foundation text for the exuberant holiday of Purim, and a source for the joke that wryly (if inaccurately) sums up all the Jewish holidays: “They tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat.”

Jewish Comedy offers a comprehensive, accessible treatment of a complex subject. As the famous 1960s ad campaign for Levy’s rye bread told us, you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy it.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber’s Jewish Comedy: A Serious History is an erudite and entertaining exploration of the multidimensional Jewish comic sensibility, one that plows familiar ground while also unearthing humor in some surprising places.

FictionDebut Fiction

Revolution on the airwaves

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Bill McKibben is well-known for his environmental activism, especially his passionate advocacy on the issue of climate change. With 16 books to his credit (including his 1989 work, The End of Nature, often considered to be the first book on climate change for a general audience), he has never before tried his hand at fiction. McKibben’s good-natured debut novel, Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance, is the story of a quartet of Vermonters who resort to unconventional tactics to persuade their fellow citizens to entertain the seemingly preposterous idea of seceding from the United States.

The conspirators’ ringleader is Vern Barclay, a septuagenarian former talk show host. He holes up with Perry Alterson—a 19-year-old with mild Asperger’s syndrome and a passion for Motown music—in the home of Vern’s friend, Sylvia Granger, who runs a “School for New Vermonters” that teaches skills like driving in the mud. They’re joined by Trance Harper, a former Olympic biathlete. With Perry as his engineer, Vern launches a series of podcasts inspired by his concern that “our communities were starting to fail,” and urges the inhabitants of the Green Mountain State to consider following in the footsteps of the movement’s stubbornly independent patron saint: Revolutionary War soldier and politician Ethan Allen.

The actions of Vern and his cohorts, including a few pranks that are more irritating than dangerous, provoke a gross overreaction by the authorities, played out in some scenes of mostly slapstick violence. McKibben wisely leaves unresolved the ultimate question of whether Vermonters will vote at their annual town meetings to support turning their state into a fledgling republic, while effectively portraying even Vern’s mounting ambivalence as his movement rapidly gathers momentum.

Radio Free Vermont is less a brief for secession than it is a gentle argument for the virtues of responsible civic engagement. In a time when many Americans feel alienated from the machinery of government, that’s a message worth taking seriously.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Bill McKibben’s good-natured debut novel, Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance, is the story of a quartet of Vermonters who resort to unconventional tactics to persuade their fellow citizens to entertain the seemingly preposterous idea of seceding from the United States.

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