The stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live. On the flip side, expressly fictional tales can help make underlying or barely conscious stories that actually do shape our lives more explicit, more reachable. Good contemporary American fiction can do that—can inform as well as entertain, can help reveal ourselves to ourselves. Here are reviews of two books that in quite different ways do that: American by Day by Derek B. Miller, and Rough Animals by Rae DelBianco.
There’s more to life than mulling over weighty concerns, fretting about the latest Trump lie, thinking about how to fix what’s broke, or worrying about our grandchildren’s future. A good book offers entertaining diversion from the sometimes grim or disturbing realities of the contemporary world. But at precisely the same time, paradoxically, it can also help us see that world—certain aspects or dimensions of it, anyway—perhaps more clearly. I wish you happy reading.
American by Day (2018), 
by Derek B. Miller
Miller, Derek B. 2018 American by Day. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
This is a fine, smart, often humorous, often serious novel that explores what a Jungian analyst might call the contemporary American soul. Paraphrasing one of the blurbs on the back cover, it has the brains of literary fiction in the body of a thriller.
American by Day explores aspects of contemporary America through the eyes of its Norwegian protagonists. Viewing today’s America from this European perspective, a reader might think of Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous nineteenth century study of Democracy in America (originally published in 1835. No doubt with this parallel in mind, Miller throws in one or two references to that work.)
Surprisingly for a thriller or crime novel, and also in part why it straddles the two genres, the major characters are good people—smart, compassionate, caring, conscientious. They are imperfect, some more so than others, with their own quirks and foibles; but they don’t easily divide up into “good guys” vs. “bad guys” or heroes fighting criminals. The two or three peripheral and least likeable characters work nominally on the side of law and justice, although in flawed and misguided ways that reflect some of the broken edges of American life. Its unusually rich character development helps set American By Day off from the run-of-the-mill “thriller.”
The story lines weave around the main characters’ respective struggles to keep their humanness, and each other, within a system that is fundamentally broken by racism, inequality, bureaucratic indifference, and a prevailing focus on political “optics” rather than truth or justice.
Two deaths that had already occurred in a small community in upstate New York set the stage for the novel’s narrative. A policeman known for his “alt-right” sympathies shot a young black boy who was holding a realistic-looking cap gun as he played in his yard with two white friends. A local grand jury called the incident an understandable if regrettable error and exonerated the cop without even sending the matter to trial.
Subsequently the boy’s aunt, a bright, beautiful, young black woman professor named Lydia Jones died after falling from the sixth story of an unfinished abandoned building. Murder, suicide, accident? It’s not clear. Her Norwegian lover Marcus Ødegård is implicated in some way in her death—we don’t know how until the end.
Marcus disappears after Lydia dies. The narrative begins as Marcus’s sister, Sigrid Ødegård, a police chief in Norway, puts her job on hold and comes across the Atlantic to upstate New York to find Marcus, help sort things out, and hopefully somehow untangle him from the craziness of American life that he’s become caught up in. A picture of America—American culture and American justice—unfolds from the perspective of this intelligent and perceptive northern European who must navigate an explosive mix of racial tension, politics, and a fragmented local justice system to save her brother.
Knowing Marcus as she does, Sigrid is certain that he could not have murdered Lydia; but he was at the scene, and the local officials have testimony of what sounds to them like a confession before he disappeared. Even more, they desperately need to tamp down seething anger in the Black community that threatens to erupt into violent riots by charging someone for Lydia’s death—and who better for the purpose than a white foreigner.
Irv Wylie, the local sheriff with whom—and sometimes against whom—Sigrid must work is less sure than she is of Marcus’s innocence, and is under great pressure from above to put the incident to rest. Initially trained in philosophy by Jesuits, Sheriff Irving Wylie is very smart also; and he is committed to finding the just, and not just the most expedient, resolution. Sigrid and Sheriff Wylie eventually track Marcus to a lake deep in the Adirondacks where they find him just as he contemplates suicide. His story as he tells it to them there finishes unravelling the complicated skein of personal and cultural tragedies that led to Lydia’s death.
As the story unfolds, Sigrid’s penetrating observations of American culture help open Irving’s eyes to see more clearly the plights of the Black families who helped vote him into office. Toward the end, the sheriff addresses a largely Black congregation in a moving—call it a sermon/confession—in which he helps defuse Black anger over the two deaths and explains what really happened to Lydia.
Some of the book’s more astute explorations of American life come out in conversations between Sigrid Ødegård and Sheriff Irving Wylie, but another nice instance occurs in one of the book’s flashbacks. I’ll close with it. Marcus Ødegård has come across some of Lydia’s publications, and tries to understand his lover and what happened to her by reading them. As you would expect of someone in her shoes, she writes about race, culture, and the American identity. Here Marcus comes across a transcript of an interview with Lydia conducted by Darren Farley, published in the journal Daedalus.
Lydia says that “The primary structuring ideas of American identity—the ones that sustain us as a culture through time—orient us away from dealing with racism, not toward dealing with it.”
But Darren asks: What about “liberty and justice for all, and equality and civil rights?” Those are the basic American values, aren’t they?
Lydia: “In my view, all those wonderful values are reposed on something else. We think they’re core, but the aren’t…. [Ask yourself:] ‘What’s the gravitational center that holds those ideas together? What is the organizing principle, as it were, that keeps them in orbit?’ If you spend time on it, you’ll find that a productive answer is ‘individualism’ and the worth of the single person. In one way, that is very beautiful. But it’s also pretty unyielding.”
DDarren: “So individualism is the problem?”
Lydia: “It’s not so much a problem as a paradox, isn’t it? It’s both the problem and the solution.” If you carry individualism too far, as the current “conservative movement” in America does, it “negates discussion of race and racism. It makes any effort to pay attention to group needs divisive.”
But, she continues, “this perspective is overpowering and insurmountable maybe because it’s deeper than race. it’s deeper than politics. it’s a culturally organizing system. it’s how we achieve Americanness. It’s how we do Americanness…. [To fundamentally undo racism] requires people seeing with different eyes; eyes that would force them to unravel and redefine their American selves. And that’s the one thing we can’t do, because it’s the only thing that binds us all together. One can’t escape the observation that America historically enslaves groups, but only frees individuals.”
That might give you a taste of some of the insights about American culture that twine through this novel. They do contribute to its interest. For me, they even tie nicely into some of the same issues I explore in this blog. But fundamentally it is the engaging and moving story that Miller shapes within the contours of American culture that his characters reveal that makes this a good read.
I’ve read sociological/cultural studies of various aspects of American life and the modern world generally. Sometimes I say “ah ha, yes”; other times I scratch my head, not quite getting it; and occasionally I ask myself, “what planet is this guy from?” But no journal article or sociological tome or textbook made me laugh out loud here, and then brought tears to my eyes a few pages later. It is an unusual work that can so well weave seriously perceptive analyses and critiques of aspects of contemporary American culture and identity together with a very human story in which the abstractions become the lived experience of believable characters.
Rough Animals (2018), by Rae DelBianco.
DelBianco, Rae 2018 Rough Animals: An American Western Thriller. New York: Arcade Publishing.
I started out not liking this book—almost deleted it from my Kindle e-reader before getting into it. It seemed crude, almost clumsily atmospheric, too consistently negative, the characters over-drawn and not quite real. It could hardly be more different from American by Day. But eventually a kind of poetry in the prose, the force of the writing, a compelling descriptive imagery of the characters and the situations they created, and the landscapes through which they struggled, drew me in, reluctantly at first, and kept me reading.
Under DelBianco’s pen the Utah badlands take on much the same qualities as the mythically struggling humans who inhabit them. Even the trees bleed—box elders some of which show the red stains of an infestation when cut into. The landscapes of the novel, their harshness and implacable indifference to human lives and purposes even as humans struggle in, for, and against them, beautifully described, take on the substance of a being or character in their own right within storyline of the book.
This is an example of a style of writing and thinking that sees light only in the shadows that it casts. It moves forward by slithering from one patch of darkness to the next, suggesting but never directly acknowledging the light that surrounds and defines them.
The book’s human characters seem altogether to lack beauty—yet like the land itself a kind of rough beauty emerges in their relationships to each other, to the land, and even in their unrelenting commitments to the purposes that drive them. They sometimes seem as much or more animal than human as they stumble or painfully drag or fight their ways through the different scenes with physical and psychological wounds of varying severity, often leaving literal trails of blood. Rough animals indeed. Graphic, sometimes almost poetic, descriptions of how they look and act keep the reader aware of their physicality above all—that below their fragile surfaces they are blood and tissue, organs and skeleton, viscera and bone. They live, and die, precariously, each in his or her own way as a paradoxical and uncomfortable mix of indomitable will and vulnerable, very physical, mortality.
I won’t summarize the story or further describe the characters. There is a good, long, and quite favourable review by TinoBee on Amazon.ca, if you want, that does all that. Let me just say that in the end the book is worth reading. But for me, my initial ambivalence never wholly dissipated. Maybe that’s just to say that it’s not a comfortable book—isn’t meant to be. Don’t expect an easy ride.