3: Gentrifiers

PRIMARY:

• Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)
• Benjamin Markovits, You Don’t Have To Live Like This (2015)

SECONDARY:

• Benjamin Markovits, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: how to write about race in the US”, Guardian, August 1, 2015 [here] *
• Peter Moskovitz, How to Kill a City (2018)
• James Peacock, Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age (2015)
• Pieter Vermeulen, “Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction”, Textual Practice, 29:2 (2015), pp.  273-293.
• Aliki Varvogli, “Urban Mobility and Race: Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and Teju Cole’s Open City“, Studies in American Fiction, 44:2 (Fall 2017), pp. 235-257

Pre-Class Notes

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I want to conceptualise this week’s novels in terms of momentum and inertia. Particularly in Markovits’ You Don’t Have to Live Like This, I have been observing a sort of syncopation between the narrator’s motionlessness and the obvious, ultimately entropic, speed of the gentrification that is actively taking place around him. I should say actively ‘being generated’, but I do want to emphasise Marny’s peculiar inability to perceive the New Jamestown project as a specific output of his participation. I refer here to that distancing tactic he calls upon in almost every description. That is, inserting the phrase ‘one of those’before detailing a specific scene, as if willing it to become more general, less implicating; ‘one of those gated roads’, ‘one of those guys who thinks, they were the best four years of my life’, ‘one of those crazy guys who isn’t meant to be alone’. Even as he describes Robert James as having the face of ‘one of those statues’, he adds ‘there was something impersonal about it’ (Markovits, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, 6); thus we read the key to that crutch, ‘one of those’.

Of course, that contrast between character and context is evident in The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears as well. Vermeulen remarks on the juxtaposition of Sepha’s stasis and the quick renovation of Judith’s house, although this dynamic rather marks his exclusion from potentiality rather than the somewhat condemnable obfuscation of responsibility that Marny’s inertia indicates. (Vermeulen, ‘Reading alongside the market’) I am very interested in the charge of self-absorption, wilful ignorance, that I think Markovits is levelling against Marny; it exists at the level of style as well as plot and takes on a deeply ironic shade when we remember Marny’s early complaint that ‘…there should be a better test of who I am than middle-class American life’ (Markovits, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, 4). I need hardly explain that Marny’s greatest test has been the re-creation of that middle class life.

Taken in conjuction with the deliberately distancing narrative style described above, Marny’s inability – or unwillingness – to act throughout the novel, can be taken as the site of that accusation. He bears witness to two echoing confrontations (Clarence and Michael, Nolan and Tony), and both times he is left standing passively on the sidelines, living out the generic observational position he has narrated for himself. In fact, during the fight between Nolan and Tony, he ‘sat on [his] bed fighting a strong sense of unreality’ (Markovits, YDHtLLT, 297). Much is already made in the novel of his non-intervention and its symbolism, but I also want to point out the chilling implication of the word ‘unreality’ and the following reverie about highway driving; Marny cannot recognise the consequences of his (in)action and his participation in the New Jamestown project, even as they brawl in his living room. In some ways, I see Markovits’ charge against Marny in a very similar light to Robinson’s implicit criticism of John Ames’ failure to help Jack Boughton in Gilead; they have both abdicated their responsibilities to the world in favour of a fabricated internal life.

At the same time, I think this inertia is closely bound to the theme of repetition throughout the novel. Marny complains early on about people who ‘run out of their own thoughts and phrases and have to borrow material from other sources’ (Markovits, YDHtLLT, 65 – 66); he criticises Nolan for it, and we observe Robert James committing the same crime when he says to an interviewer, ‘The idea behind the whole place… is that we wanted to take a virtual community and make it real’. (Markovtis, YDHtLLT, 154). Nevertheless, Markovits has done exactly that in sourcing one of the most grating lines of the novel (perhaps more than one); in his 2015 Guardian article, he attributes ‘salt in a pepper pot’ to a 12-year-old friend from Junior High. But even this kid, as Markovits succinctly points out ‘must have heard it somewhere’ (Markovits, ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, 2015). Now, the sound bite borrowings within You Don’t Have to Live Like This become a sort of inheritance of ideological hand-me-downs from the real world. And the stasis that Marny is creating from the language that we now know he too has borrowed can be fully recognised for its sinister self-interest. [MS]

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There is no way to talk around race when it comes to gentrification; both You Don’t Have to Live Like This and The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears thus build up the tension between communities and characters of different races throughout the process of gentrification, and culminates in racial conflict. While they wildly differ in their approach—written from the perspective of the gentrifier and the gentrified, one written in a macro-scale scandal in Detroit around a widely publicized contemporary event, the other within a small radius of an obscure neighborhood—they both delineate, on an individual level, interracial relationships that, in a seemingly eventual/inevitable manner, fall apart; and on a larger scale, the racial divide in urban space. Gentrification models market themselves as reinvestment and creation of diversity and dynamism, but in fact turns cities and neighborhoods into another cog in the capitalist wheel that builds capital upon capital; eviction, alienation of people of color, and skyrocketing rent results in (often black) population decline, and solidifies the segregation of urban space drawn along invisible but marked lines of race and class. In The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, the stark contrast between Judith’s “shining big manor” and Naomi’s observation that Stephanos’ store obviously doesn’t carry honey foreshadow the ultimate incompatibility of the two.

Both novels further depict how each protagonist might be implicated in their lack of action. Stephanos, despite being an Ethiopian immigrant who fled the Red terror, appears unambitious and immobile in America, slipping into the role of helplessness, remaining in space he contends is “entirely his own” (228)—despite its being far from it. On the other hand, it was remarkable the degree to which Marnier embodies the nearly necessary carelessness of gentrifiers (at the expense of the very communities they seek to “improve”), and middle-class WASP defensiveness in the face of the harm he perpetuates with his choices. As Professor Kalisch pointed out, he distances himself from responsibility and claims neutrality to avoid accountability (“I don’t want to take sides here” (329) “I don’t know what I did”. (370)) The difference for the two lies in their access to mobility. Stephanos constantly faces fear of eviction, yet simultaneously is confined to stagnancy in an increasingly alienating neighborhood, while Marnier and his Old Boys Club easily flee the polemic, riotous conflict raging in Detroit to rebuild their lives in another form of middle-class comfort. 

This is partly due to the fact that gentrification is, as Moskovitz points out in How to Kill a City, abetted by civil and public institutions that “favor the creation of wealth over the creation of communities.” (p. 23) I Don’t Have to Live Like This fictionalizes the gentrification of Detroit amidst the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, which benefited large banks and investment firms who were safely bailed out by the government by the end of the year, while hundreds of thousands lost their homes as the economic bubble resulting from “clever real-estate” schemes burst into one of America’s worst depressions. 

It is difficult to write about race in America, precisely because the task requires an honesty that will cause sensitive reaction, discomfort, discrepant interpretations. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: How to Write about Race in America Markovitz argues that “fiction . . . should offer the freedom to tackle these subjects”, despite the perhaps inevitable guilt that follows. He acknowledges that in You Don’t Have to Live Like This, the “narrator is supposed to be a little off about race”; initially enraging, but ultimately a depiction true to modern-day America. [JK]

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I have hit backspace so many times on this note that I’m surprised it eventually got written.

Time – is my favourite question to look at in any literary text I read, and I noticed that in The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, Stephanos runs only on his individual clock. He opens and closes his store when he feels like it, tries to avoid the rush hour of customers, and is basically intent on being the most underperforming black man in America. It doesn’t bother him much that his profits are abysmal and that he’s being evicted. His only wish is to lead a quiet life and read books all day. His individualism comes to him at a high price, which is where the fissure between the idea of America and its reality is most visible. As a black man, his subjectivity is already hyphenised – which means that agency can only be available to him conditionally.

Because Stephanos is not an African-American but an African immigrant from Ethiopia (which was never colonised by a European nation-state), one could say that the racialization of his subjectivity begins only when he moves to America. Without the shared history of slavery, he’s unable to relate very closely with the African-Americans. In Ethiopia, he had belonged to a somewhat wealthy family that lived an easy life before the emperor was deposed. However, wealth wouldn’t make living in America easier for him (as he observes in the case of Kenneth). Perhaps his inability to reconcile himself with his new reality betrays a struggle to hold on to his former truth, his pre-coup, pre-racial identity.  His father’s cufflinks, the “name-the-coup” game, and his outdated map of Africa aren’t just relics – they are talismans which allow him to board the nostalgia train indefinitely. He looks at his life in America as a “poorly-constructed substitute” for the one he lived back in Ethiopia.

Mengestu’s sketches in his D.C. a critique of the idea of the cosmopolitan capital as a site of convergence. According to Paul Gilroy, “methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history, an exposure to otherness…might qualify as essential to a cosmopolitan commitment (After Empire: Multicultural or Postcolonial Melancholia 67).” However, cosmopolitan capitals are structured in such a way that they do very little to promote a cosmopolitan commitment in their inhabitants. In Mengestu’s experience (and mine), the “exposure to otherness” offered by cosmopolitan capitals is so fleeting that it offers very little time or incentive for interaction or understanding (Everyone’s trying to get somewhere, quickly). What such an exposure mostly achieves is an unabashed assertion of the self through one’s own culture and history, and a further divergence from the other. [Mehvish Siddiqui, MS]

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This week, I want to discuss the role of the body in the novels we have read so far – specifically the sexualisation of the female body and the black body, especially when they intersect.

In You Don’t Have To Live Like This, I noticed several disturbing instances where Marny’s descriptions of women seemed to break them down into their composite parts – like slabs of meat. 

For example, when Marny meets Clay Greene’s wife, Helen, she is described as ‘a very tall, handsome, likable, not at all graceful woman,’ (Makovits, p. 74). When Beatrice comes in, Marny observes as the ‘two big, good-looking women embraced, leaning over each other.’ (Markovits, p. 75). Even Beatrice, whom Marny purports to be in love with, is the object of his removed physical descriptions: when they are lying in bed together at Bill Russo’s lake house party, Marny refers to her as a ‘big warm female animal’, the thought of which gives him an erection (Markovits, p. 83).

Like Chip and Gary Lambert in The Corrections, Marny is plagued by fantasies about these women.  However, as he himself remarks, these intensely sexualised fantasies have very little to do with his interactions with the women he’s around: ‘this feeling of being in love had so little to do with my actual relations with her, with our friendship, which was real enough.’ (Markovits, p. 43)

Walter, in a way, is the polar opposite to Marny. He is, in one way, the character to is most reminiscent of Franzen’s Chip Lambert, in that they both have affairs with underage students. However, Walter’s approach to the affair is very different to Chip’s, more tender, less gross. In fact, he won’t even admit what kind of sexual acts he has committed with his underage girlfriend, Susie – instead he just says “I know her intimately.” (Markovits, p. 95) and when Beatrice presses him further, he says “I don’t like thinking about any of this the way you describe it.” (Markovits, p. 95)

However, the worst descriptions are those of Gloria, the beautiful black art teacher that Marny first meets at the lake house party: 

‘She was a ripe-colored black woman, almost eggplant-colored. Her lips were painted some glossy shade that made them look freshly licked. In her summer dress she stood the way a man stands in jeans – I could see her plump strong legs under the material. She was short, too, and looked about fifteen year sold.’ (Markovits, p. 72-73)

Here, Marny’s gaze lingers on Gloria, reducing her to ‘eggplant-colored’ skin and ‘plump legs’ – it’s almost like he’s describing a horse. Later, Marny thinks about kissing her: ‘I had never kissed a black girl and wondered if they tasted different.’ (Markovits, p. 77) This connection to taste, for me, sounded more cannibalistic than sexual. However you read it, Marny’s keen focus on Gloria’s body becomes something other, something darker, more twisted. And it made me distinctly uncomfortable throughout.

Reading Markovits was not the first time I was struck by this type of physical description, in which women are broken down into their smallest physical composites (lips, thighs, meat). I also recognised this in The Corrections, where both Chip and Gary Lambert’s observations of (and fantasies about) women are really disturbingly sexual – but also violent.

In a way, these novels deal with the body politic in a much more literal way than Saunders, with the bardo as the metaphor and the ‘occupation’ of other characters (through reading) as the manifestation. Here, that “manifestation” becomes sinister, linked to the morally questionable process of gentrification, perpetrated by Marny in You Don’t Have to Live Like This, and perpetrated on Sepha in All The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

The scene that most uncomfortably demonstrates this is perhaps Marny’s flashback to his college days, where he walks into a sorority party where everyone attending (except Marny) was black:

‘Even though there were maybe two hundred people in the room, which was hot with crowded bodies, I had the sense that something private was going on, and it was only after I walked out again, into the cooler evening, that I realized how that could be. What I had seen was somehow racially private […] a place where ‘things could be said and done without embarrassment, which wouldn’t be shown or discussed outside.’ (Markovits, p. 121)

Here, Many’s sexual attraction is literally reduced to the act of gazing at black bodies – something that both he and the reader are intently aware of, and something which becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

While Markovits acknowledges that the narrator “is supposed to be a little off about race” (Markovits, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: How to Write about Race in America) I find that these sexualised racial descriptions stray beyond that into uncomfortable territory. [Caroline Koktvedgaard, CK]

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You Don’t Have to Like This is a curious book. There are interesting questions raised about race, gentrification, colonisation, America – though I struggle to say precisely what they are. There aren’t any answers, though they’re never promised, and wouldn’t really belong with the tone of the book. At the least, I admire the novel for the strength of this uncertainty, and its commitment to such a tone: uncomfortable, idiosyncratic, undeniably memorable. Its very intense, in its flat way.

The main problem is Marny. In some ways, he’s the perfect narrator/observer, a self-confessed ‘periphery guy’: a question-asker, a follower, an observer, insipid, built in shades of grey. He can play, as the Guardian review puts it, Nick Carraway to Robert’s Gatsby. And yet even Robert is a very austerity Gatsby, a very undynamic mover-shaker. He was the ‘Greek God’ in college, a cut-out ‘Yalie’ archetype (‘He had the face of one of those statues. There was something impersonal about it’) who speaks in empty soundbites (‘Groupon model of gentrification’): an uninspiring and uninspired Pioneer who nonetheless gets Obama on board his personal ship to the future. 

Robert and most of his modern-day colonialists belong to a world run not particularly on reality but rather on what John Patrick Leary would call the ‘Keywords for the austerity age’: concepts like ‘innovation’, ‘entrepreneur’, ‘sustainability’ and so on, which combine a very exploitable vagueness with an air of moral significance. Hence the ‘visionary’ of ‘New Jamestown’ can nicely create a do-it-yourself, communal future which ‘has to make money too’: Ruskin as a hedge-fund-manager, without a particular sense of contradiction. It’s a prime example of what Marny labels in Robert as ‘a kind of efficient intelligence’ – a way to have your cake and eat it too. Max Weber once wrote of the capitalist future as the fabrication of an ‘ethical orientation towards profit’ (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism): here we see this in full ironic flight, real-estate and industrial impulse given the virtue of a calling. 

Marny, on the other hand, more ‘intellectual’, less efficiently intelligent, combines literal vagueness (see the style: ‘one of those …’ ad nauseam; ‘this and then this and then this’ stories) with moral vagueness. When Hillary Clinton asks him what he’s up to, he replies, vaguely ominously, ‘biding his time’. He could be in investment, he could be a school shooter – and this is the kind of tightrope of tension he walks throughout. This ‘biding’ seems a general existential condition for Marny. What is he waiting for? We don’t know. His deadened, absent, slightly misanthropic voice suspends a difficult, uneasy atmosphere over the entire narrative. It feels stale, brittle, like something that could go up at any time – as indeed ‘New Jamestown’ does. But Marny drifts onto something else, a football game ending, even after that. Resolution of any sort is impossible.

Throughout, there are odd, painfully banal vignettes – the girls eating burgers at the trailer park, wiping ketchup-stained hands? – which must be beside the point of any plot, but are somehow perfectly of a piece with the general tone. If the prose is ‘Franzen on slim-fast’ (Sunday Times), there’s some anaesthetic thrown in too. Ethical, aesthetic anaesthesia. The reader faces a wilful imposition of mundanity – mundanity with vague air of existential loss/wandering – that feels simultaneously aggressive and confused. Marny’s lack of purpose is so elusive that it’s hard not to trace it at least part back to the author. You wonder what exactly Markowitz is trying to do, and whether prose so suppressed and indistinct can really act as collective indictment/commentary on America entire? Might it not be closer to Eliot’s comments on The Waste Land (when suggested as such an indictment of a generation) – ‘the relief of a wholly personal … grouse against life’?

I don’t know, and I don’t think one excludes the other, but there is something so repressive about the prose, so uncertain, insoluble and occasionally abortive, that I find any political or social comment is hard to extract with anything other than a slight unease, or a sense of having missed the point. This is perhaps the point. The novel is bravely uncomfortable throughout, as indeed any discussion of race like this must be. But it’s more than just the topics dealt with, it’s personal and Markowitz/Marny-shaped too. Eliot said of Ruskin: ‘One feels that the emotional intensity of Ruskin is partly a deflection of something that was baffled in life’. In the novel, the emotional inertiafeels like a deflection of something baffled in life. What to make, for example, of the sexual dimension, the frustration, diversion and discomfort there? It continually rears it head as some background motor to everything Marny does, and there’s surely a substrata of homo-erotic tension? Discussions of ‘the kind of guy who falls in loves with guys’ (though ‘not in a gay way’), the self-conscious fixation on how ‘good-looking’ everyone isn’t, the Talented Mr Ripley type relationship with Robert, the wrapped-up language of insecure masculine America – so much seems not quite said. 

And who is Marny anyway? He says early in the novel that: ‘You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away’. For him, identity seems a kind of momentum. He goes along with things, his plot is passive, and so things kind of run away with him, without him understanding why. That’s an impression I got with the book as a whole. I’m not sure if that’s a criticism.  [MBW]

Considering gentrification in relation to these two novels, I was struck by the degree to which the representation of the city in a novel is part of a long Western tradition of representation. It seems extremely difficult to escape the legacy of not only the Modernist city-walker, but also the Victorian city, even the Romantic city. Just as a city displays a ‘visible history’ (Middlemarch), the language of its description is a collage of tired tropes that accumulate within certain moments of perception to produce an effect of the breakdown of teleological history, of an archaeology which does not give a history of the present, which emphasises Marny and Sepha’s sense of estrangement inside neighbourhoods in states of transformation. I am thinking particularly of the reflection of the preoccupation with inside/outside in the Markovits in relation to metaphors relating buildings to their inhabitants.

Markovits has Marny think overwhelmingly in metaphor as he approaches and first sees Detroit (pp.28-31); the Woolfian vision of the structure of a city merging subjectivity and objectivity becomes the bizarre vision of ‘those sugar-spun cages you get over fancy deserts. I imagined lifting up one of those bridges with my finger, and watching all of the other highways, […] pulling away from the ground, because they’re all connected, and leaving a tan line across America, […] with a few worms digging around underneath, some pill bugs and dirty wet leaves.’ This accumulation of the consumable product, childhood game, decay, and undressing a (clearly white) woman – suggestive of the eco-feminist critique of the colonial history that, ironically, Marny has studied – is slightly ridiculous in its cynical presentation of Marny as a deeply problematic narrator. This emphasis continues with ‘cookie-cutter cul-de-sacs’, and is followed by more cliché anthropomorphism – ‘the cars had the air of survivors’, ‘the neighbourhood changed character’, and in his comparison of Detroit to his memory of Katrina, ‘the houses looked stepped on. Their insides lay spread out…’. It seems to me that Markovits layers traditions of city-description to suggest a decay in the literary city itself, vulnerable for renovation with the hollow certainty of neoliberal jargon and utopian vision which divorces it from the lived history and narratives imbued inside its architecture; Robert’s determination that he can ‘set up any kind of society’ (p.17). Taking the anthropomorphism of buildings through a reductio ad absurdum towards the end, Markovits presents Robert’s motivation as a crude desire to keep women looking beautiful; ‘A woman needs privacy to look good […] It’s a question of real estate’ (p.380).

As Varvogli explores, Mengestu’s play with time and memory layers the D.C. through which Sepha travels with the Addis Ababa he has left behind, keeping both in a sense suspended in the present; ‘I saw glimpses of home whenever I came across three or four roads that intersected at odd angles, in the squat glass off buildings caught in the sun’s glare’ (pp.175-6). Mengestu uses a similarly conscious tired language as does Markovits, but from the perspective of an immigrant. After abandoning his shop in reaction to receiving the eviction notion, Sepha looks back at his store and thinks, ‘I can imagine it wanting to be spared the burden of having to survive another year’, before reflecting on his action, ‘What is the proper equation, the perfect simile or metaphor? I’m an immigrant. I should know this.’ (p.74) This self-consciousness is also apparent in Sepha’s observation of the boarded-up houses in the south of his neighbourhood while walking; ‘There was a unique fear that came with feeling it was the inanimate objects around you that frightened you most. The crumbling brick facades streaked with black from fires that had raged decades ago didn’t need rumours of violence to intimidate. […] Like anything, they had softened with time. All I saw now was how sad and empty they looked’ (pp.162-3). With this traditional anthropomorphism, verging on animism (I’m reminded of ‘Time Passes’ in To the Lighthouse, and Dicken’s particularly racist initial description of Coketown as the red and black face of the savage as a precursor to Modernist primitivism), Mengestu both suggests a moment in which Sepha seems to have internalised a gentrifier’s discourse necessitating renovation through fear, and then by moving the metaphor on to sadness emphasises Sepha’s isolation as a immigrant who sees only a projection of himself in his surroundings. There is therefore a further irony in the merging of building and inhabitant in the vandalism towards the end the novel, which is carried out by means of bricks. [RJ]

Post-Class Notes

Our discussion this week focused on how — from the perspectives of both sides — gentrification can be used to draw out hypocrises in American narratives. Rachel gave us a brilliant sense of the way in which gentrification inverts and subverts the traditional immigrant/American Dream narrative, and Brandon drew out the means by which gentrification makes visible demarcations between in/out groups in the US.

Drawing on the secondary texts for this week, Rachel began by describing the archetypal immigrant narrative from which Mengestu departs. In typical immigrant stories, the protagonist embarks on a movement through space and time which begins in their home country and ends in the US, where they achieve some sort of social mobility. Sepha has already embarked on this journey, settled himself into Logan Circle, and this is where the narrative begins, and where a very different sort of movement occurs. Through act of gentrification, the “home” that he has developed in Logan Circle is erased — the movement of rich white families displaces those poorer individuals who formed the neighborhood. I particularly liked the term “spatial overwrite” as a description for this process; whereas in immigration, home remains rooted in space, in gentrification, the home is literally dismantled by developers and rich white families. Moreover, Sepha has no agency in this transformation. Gentrification is something that happens to you; immigration is something that you do.

Rachel developed the theme of agency through the metaphor of a pendulum. Sepha’s decade in the US has slid back and forth between illusions of socioeconomic ascension and decline, but all the while he has remained effectively in stasis. In pursuing social mobility he has always been the subject of economic forces — gentrification, low wages, etc. The eviction letter then serves as a means to escape this cycle. In pushing him out of this stasis, it allows him a sort of freedom, a means by which to become an agent in and of himself.

Our discussion moved across a whole range of topics, but one theme I want to pull out is that of time. Mo pointed out, I think really insightfully, that while most of the novel takes place in the present, in moments with Julia the work slips into the past tense. The closest we get to an explanation for this comes on page 81, when Sepha thinks: ““How was it that I never seemed to understand time when Judith was around? Too fast or too slow, or as in this case, not at all.” I wonder if this suggests Judith plays some role in the stasis of the novel, in keeping him moving back and forth with the pendulum. They might then be in the past tense because, if we follow Rachel’s reading, by the end of the novel he’s escaped this stasis.

Michael (Kalisch, i.e. “other Michael”) also noted the repetition compulsion of Kenneth’s adopted sayings, like “keep fighting the good fight.” I think these become particularly interesting given Rachel’s point on stasis in the novel. Despite prevalent American notions of linear progress, these white-male-executive catchphrases are repeated infinitely, suggesting that the idea of movement or progression collapses under its own weight. Through Kenneth, we see that Corporate America is itself a form of stasis, whatever it may profess about progress towards an infinite horizon.

Our discussion of You Don’t Have to Live Like This focused more on the role of perspective and in/out groups. Brandon brought out the theme of interior/exterior in the work, and they way it manifests itself across a variety of other topics, just two of which I’ll focus on here.

The first topic was how complex Marny’s perspective is in the work. The prose itself is incredibly bare; one Guardian reviewer wrote that the novel is build from “straight-plank prose, its lines and structure as pleasingly solid and clean as those of a Shaker chair.” As someone said during the discussion, he is “as a symbol of passivity, of weak character connections, he lacks a strong identity. But this unadorned prose and narratorial passivity hides a perspective that is insidiously biased and present in the work. Marny is exterior to almost every group, not only black communities, but even his college friends. Moreover, he seems meaningfully unable to imagine other’s interiority’s. And so rather than portraying the other characters, his writing becomes an act of projection through preconceptions. We come to understand this function through other characters in the work, like when Marny’s mother talks about Detroit and Marny responds “You’re totally out of touch with these things, Mom. All you know is what you read online or see on TV” (21); or when Marny writes that “Part of the point of driving was to see America, but you don’t see much of America from the road” (24). This unimaginative externality shows up in tons of other places in the work. I wonder what Markovits is expressing through this; maybe its about literature’s futility in trying to imagine other’s interiority, as this would flow in some way with the comments he made in the Guardian on writing from a black perspective.

The second topic was the way in which Markovits interrogates the formation of a community — what divides in from out. We spent some time on the passage where Robert describes his thinking on what size New Jamestown should be, and settles on about “a midsize college campus.” There are a lot of superficial answers like this in the work, not least amongst them the philosophy behind the “groupon model for gentrification.” Markovits seems to indicate the things that develop a community by their absence in Marny’s narration. For example, Marny has no solid conception of history outside its novelty role in lead soldiers and lectures on colonial America; so the idea that communities can’t be formed, but have to grow across generations, never arrives. Jamestown never becomes a community because its “founders” have no real sense of what a community is.

This interior/exterior theme came up in a lot more areas — on the depiction of modern colonization in the novel, on the creative attraction of Detroit, on the place of Obama in this black/white narrative — that I don’t have space to fully recount. But I do want to end on the question that’s been following me since our discussion: what is with bodegas and record shops?

In all seriousness, I really haven’t been able to shake the question as to why Jez Lansky’s record shop (and bodegas in general) are able to transcend the lines of in/out that elsewhere are drawn so strictly. If anyone has any thoughts, I’d love to keep discussing it next class. [IMP]

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It’s been a real pleasure reading some of the pre-class notes that got caught upon the technical glitch, and relating them to our class discussion. I’ve been fascinated by the strength of response the Markovits novel has engendered (I like that its affectless tone should be so affecting), to the extent that it’s made me reconsider my own reading and reaction; I’m wondering if, having read and taught the novel a few times, I’d become a little desensitised to Marny. Reading the charge sheet levelled at him in Caroline’s comment (which we elaborated on in class), I’ve come to think that suggesting Mary’s a ‘bit off’ about race seems like Mary-esque indirection and understatement. I think one of the many troubling aspects is the ambiguity of agency in the novel – what Mo deftly picks up on in the idea of momentum, and which a couple of you compared to Chip’s situation. Rachel’s presentation brilliantly explored a similar dynamic in the Mengestu, via the figure of the pendulum, in the very different circumstances of an immigrant narrative. But I’m still wondering if we’re meant simply to dismiss Marny’s investment in the community project, such as it is, as simply self-serving and uncomfortably appropriative and potentially neo-colonialist, or whether there’s something salvageable in it. To answer this, it seem important to consider the opinion of Marny’s brother Brad, a high-flying businessman who still ‘dresses like a frat boy on spring break’: ‘You’re kidding yourself’, he says to Marny, ‘if you think that Americans want to help each other out. That’s not what I pay my taxes for. I pay my taxes so that other people are not my problem’ (268). In this, Brad sounds a little like Tony, the combative Italian-American, and one of the few native Detroiters in the book: Don’t expect me to say that some of my best friends are black. My best friends aren’t black […] I know some brothers, and like a few, too, but there’s a point beyond which I don’t really understand or trust them, and to be honest, the black guys I respect are the ones who feel the same about me’. (63) There’s a bullshit-free pragmatism to this, to be sure, but I’m wondering what we’re really meant to make of such a negative conception of liberty, and impoverished idea of citizenship and community. 

Another (unrelated) point that Rhona’s post brought to mind was the two very different cities in these novels, and that any account of these narratives would have to take in the racial and broad cultural  history of each city. Detroit makes sense for the Markovits, because it has been a city that has suffered  from racial tension and white flight since the 1960s, divisions that were exacerbated by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, an event that brings Obama and national politics into the orbit of the city and the novel. There’s also of course the city’s manufacturing heritage, a theme that gets played out in the aluminium scandal in the novel  But why does Mengestu pick D.C.?  I think part of the novel’s dynamic is about the small world of Sepha’s grocery store in the shadow of national, monumental history: in this regard, it reminded me a bit of a moment in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which a Jewish-American family from Newark also consider national identity and patriotism while on a tour of the Mall. 

On ‘the other Michael’s’ point about bodegas – which I fear I probably banged on about too much in class – I’ve been reading this for a course I’m teaching next term, and it’s fascinating on ‘shop girl’ narratives and department store modernism. [MK]