You Don't Have to Live Like This
A Novel
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- 6,49 €
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- 6,49 €
Publisher Description
A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America—one man’s story of a racially charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan.
“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. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.”
Greg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn’t much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President—not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny’s billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project “the Groupon model for gentrification,” others call it “New Jamestown,” and Marny calls it home— until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong.
You Don’t Have to Live Like This is the breakout novel from the “fabulously real” (Guardian) voice of the only American included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Using the framework of our present reality, Benjamin Markovits blurs the line between the fictional and the fact-based, and captures an invisible current threaded throughout American politics, economics, and society that is waiting to explode.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British writer Markovits (Imposture) takes on race, gentrification, and postrecession Detroit in his engrossing but somewhat thinly sketched seventh novel. Set in the years after the 2008 global financial collapse, the novel tells the story of Greg "Marny" Marnier, a 30-something Yale graduate and failed academic who, lacking better alternatives, follows his old classmate, a millionaire entrepreneur named Robert James, to Detroit, where James hopes to a revitalize several down-and-out neighborhoods according to what he calls the "Groupon model for gentrification." New Jamestown (as the neighborhoods come to be known) attracts new tenants a patchwork population that includes artists, writers, tech workers, and "Tea Party types" (according to the narrator) but the influx of the (mostly white) newcomers vexes the area's original inhabitants, in particular Nolan Smith, a local African-American artist and friend of Marny's. Confrontations between Smith and Jamestown residents, along with other racially charged incidents, ensue, culminating in a trial and national media storm that for many readers will call to mind recent events in Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island, N.Y., and North Charleston, S.C., among others. The novel is a bit overcrowded and the prose sometimes too breezy, but Markovits writes boldly about some of our era's most important and most delicate subjects.
