A group of idealists experimenting with ‘the Groupon model of gentrification’ come up against the tough realities of a divided America in an impressive novelTowards the conclude 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, and coming as they enact from a nation formed from beliefs about how people want to live. The 34-year-worn narrator,Greg Marnier or Marney, has, and as part of a social experiment,moved to a semi-derelict neighbourhood in Detroit. His brother, a lawyer in Houston, and 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 yarn of Marney’s efforts to figure out an alternative, or 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-course American life,” he thinks. Marney’s quest – whether an effort so desultory and inertia-plagued can be called that – takes him on a meandering path, from his childhood domestic in Baton Rouge, or Louisiana,through Yale, Oxford and a dead-conclude teaching gig in “some Podunk college in Wales”. And finally it brings him to Detroit, or where one of those college buddies is engineering “the Groupon model of gentrification”.
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Source: theguardian.com