Reviews and Comments

It was both fascinating and frustrating in parts. In the end, the fascination came out ahead.

Fascinating: thinking about how a small town self-governs without a formal government. There was a mayor in East Tinderwick Maine, where all the action takes place, before technology stopped working (in an event called "the Arrest," hence the name of the book), but she just stopped being the mayor and started making baskets (or something, I forget) instead. The town is on a peninsula, and they have an uneasy bargain with a group of semi-nomadic folks who accept their food in return for keeping outsiders from invading.

Frustrating: the main character, Journeyman. He's in Maine because he was visiting his sister when the Arrest happened. Before that, he was living in LA working as a writer, but only ever on other people's scripts and ideas. He is perpetually ignorant, indecisive, drifting and weightless. He has no idea what's happening around him most of the time.

The arrival of the giant nuclear car shakes him forces him to have to make choices and take actions, and he seems to hate that. But his relationship with the car's driver is what gives the novel its meatiest sections. The driver is his old college buddy who made it big as a Hollywood producer. The old buddy is obsessed with an old idea for a sci-fi movie they had 30 years prior. The author uses their relationship to meditate on how we use scifi stories to not just escape from this world but also to create new ones.

The final confrontation is really quite satisfying, though.

Definitely worth reading. I'll be thinking about it for some time.

Glad to find I was wrong! The central thesis of the book is basically this: if it weren't for the "bad" people of society, the ones who insisted on fighting all day and fucking all night, who refused to work, who rejected society's demand for pro-social conformity, we would all enjoy a lot fewer personal freedoms. From the multi-racial bawdy houses of Philadelphia from which numerous prostitutes would have solicited the attentions of our nation's founders to the rebellious drag queens and butch dykes who rejected the assimilationism of the unsuccessful "homophile" movement of the 1950s and 60s in favor of rioting and throwing bricks at cops, Russell pays tribute to the layabouts, the lazybones, the drug dealers and rum runners, the "bad n*s", and the deviants whose refusal to bend to society's will laid the groundwork for the success of more "respectable" organizers and reformers who followed in their turbulent wake.

Any anarchist who's interested in American history should read this book. Also, it would be excellent to pair it with Nell Painter's "The Invention of Whiteness," since Painter's book about the origins of the social category of "white" is broad and abstract, and "A Renegade History" has several chapters where Russell discusses, in a detailed manner, the transition from racialized to white of the Irish, Italians, and Jewish people.