Reviews and Comments

My first Erdrich. I enjoyed it and will read more. This novel is trying to do a lot of things, and it mostly succeeds! It's about love of books; ghosts; Covid-19; policing; incarceration; and holding onto Indigenous identity in a settler society, all interspersed with plenty of wit to balance out the grim moments.

This was discounted at my local bookstore as a remainder, which makes me suspect sales have dropped off because people don't want to revisit 2020 in a society that has seemed eager these past few years to forget both the racial justice demands of that summer and the lessons about community care from the pandemic. But for that very reason, I appreciated revisiting those events; and the book is also about much more.

Occasionally, the novel's devices for withholding information to create suspense feel too obvious, straining the suspension of disbelief. Overall, a well-told and intricately textured story with many comic moments.

Also: first ever shoutout I've seen in print to my favorite Minneapolis cafe, Hard Times.

A problem with some of these social-justice-y novels is that while they might have an important point to make about oppression and alienation, that doesn't mean they succeed in situating that point within an interesting story. This novella's main plot event — the narrator, who is herself a racialized immigrant to France who works as a translator for applicants for asylum, assaulting a refugee — is already made clear at the beginning. So all that's left to be revealed is what led her to do such a thing. But when we get to that part, there isn't anything very surprising or notable there, either.

This book gave me a somewhat greater appreciation for elements of the refugee experience, and the writing was good on a textural level, but plot-wise, it felt like a stagnant pool, lacking the dynamism of storytelling that would have made it more than the sum of its parts.

I was totally absorbed in this brilliant, very weird, sometimes quite silly, but mostly gripping and sometimes downright chilling, yarn about a giant squid heist and multiple predicted apocalypses vying for imminent fulfillment. The hero Billy Harrow is a perfect stand-in for the reader, both in his initial bewilderment at the complicated supernatural world he's been thrown into, and later in his realization, gaining confidence, that he knows more than he thinks. The characters are richly drawn, from the incorporeal labor organizer Wati who speaks by temporarily inhabiting statues to the heartbroken Marge, like Billy a regular person, who's drawn into the aetherial cult world seeking answers for her partner's disappearance.

It's overwhelming sometimes, particularly in part 5 (of 7) where the novel dragged a little with a subplot that felt extraneous, but the denouement brought me back, full of unexpected twists and turns. A fitting novel for our apocalyptic times. "End of the world?" "Ends."

Some good ideas in here. I was often skimming more than taking my time as it's a bit repetitive. Highlights:

24: "Dutch police actually do very little traffic enforcement. If too many drivers speed on a street, it is deemed a design failure and sent back to the drawing board." Chapter 2: good ideas on making welcoming residential streets 52-3: the value of having fewer traffic signals on your commute. 109-110: how walks with few cars make it delightful to go to commercial areas. 144: CROW Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic requires bike paths to be direct (max 20% over as-the-crow-flies distance) and bike lanes at least 79" wide, versus NACTO 59". 163-7: Dutch Railways "operates like a national metro system" - I'm so jealous. Also how safe bike routes and abundant bike parking increase train station catchment area. 183: Roundabouts replace pavement with greenspace, mitigating climate change impacts and helping with stormwater drainage 187: Stat on sidewalk, bikeway and greenway projects creating more jobs per dollar invested than road widening

A great book, recommended if the subject of whether or not capitalism is somehow natural or inevitable interests you. It grounds that question in history while being written in approachable everyday language that presumes no specialized knowledge — not an academic tome. I learned so much and agree with the blurb by Adrienne Rich on the back: "The writing is so supple and accessible, and the argument so persuasive, it's like watching a cloudy mixture of ideas being turned into a clear solution."

To summarize: there's a pervasive notion that capitalism is inevitable as a result of drives built into human nature. This is SO pervasive in fact that even capitalism's biggest critics — committed Marxists — have often assumed it, writing histories in which capitalism naturally resulted once international trade reached a certain level, or once barriers that were holding capitalism back (feudal privilege, etc) were removed. Ellen Meiksins Wood says, actually no: those histories are using capitalism to explain capitalism, assuming that even before capitalism, people wanted above all to do things like lower the unit cost of production that only make sense according to capitalist logic. International trade and urbanization did not result in capitalism in the golden age of the Dutch Republic, and the end of feudalism did not result in capitalism in France. Specific changes to the relations of production and property in England created, not just market opportunities, but market imperatives in which people were forced to turn to the market for everyday needs. That created capitalism, and England then spread the reach of those imperatives to the rest of the world.

What's not sketched out here, only vaguely hinted at in the conclusion, is how we can use this knowledge to theorize (let alone build) a better system. After all, Wood is under no illusions that the immediate pre-capitalist system of feudalism provided a great life for most people, acknowledging frankly that there, too, there was a privileged class that exploited another. Knowing how the world transitioned from one bad system to another doesn't provide you with a good system, but it does at least show us that market imperatives are not, in fact, the automatic result of inescapable human nature.

At its best (chapters 2-3), this is an informative overview and analysis of various mutual aid programs and experiments in radical democracy that have been tried. Unfortunately, when it got around to its core concept of the "lifehouse," a maximally self-reliant community center and mutual aid hub, I felt like I was reading something closer to a daydream than the "practical guide" advertised on the back cover. The author doesn't appear to have drawn on any experience actually trying to build such a thing, despite having criticized Murray Bookchin precisely for lacking practical knowledge of how his (Bookchin's) proposed municipal assemblies would actually work.

The book is organized in four chapters:

1. Long Emergency: An overview of all of the bad things coming our way due to climate change, including lots of conflict and migration. Felt pretty superfluous. This chapter has already been written by many people, notably Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, but I also feel like I've already read versions of it in more than one other Verso book on climate. Peppered with references to events you'll recognize from 2 to 5 year old news stories.
2. Mutual Care: Studies of mutual aid efforts including Occupy Sandy (the only one the author was personally involved in, which made this by far the most interesting section of the book), Black Panthers survival programs, and Greek solidarity networks in the wake of the 2011 crisis. Well worth reading.
3. Collective Power: Studies of collective decision-making structures, including Bookchin's ideas, Spanish municipalist movements, and Rojava. The author confidently asserts Rojava's experiments in radical democracy to have been effectively ended by increased aggression in 2019, but cites no source for this, and others don't seem to agree (AK Press is just now putting out a new book, Rojava in Focus, due in February). This section was a pretty good read.
4. Beyond Hope: Outlines the "lifehouse" concept, but again, it seems like a wishlist of things that would be difficult to achieve, requiring so much free time, energy, and material resources from participants that it almost presupposes a revolution already occurred.

A set of satirical short stories about backstabbery, dysfunction and repression in the USSR during the time of (mostly) Stalin (though he's not mentioned by name), with the Borgesian touch that the narrator purports to be analyzing and reconstructing a history from other (fictional?) texts about its characters.

Short, but not a quick read: it's dense with unfamiliar names of places and historical figures, in an abbreviated style that doesn't telegraph where it's going. Some compelling moments and wry dark comedy. Once well-connected people falling out of favor and going to prison, things of that nature. Might get more out of it on a second read through.

Despite being called a novel in a back-cover blurb, each story here stands on its own, with only a rare passing reference to a character in another story.

I read this because William T. Vollmann praised it as an inspiration for Europe Central (and wrote an afterword apparently, but not in my edition), but it didn't click with me as much as that novel did.

A good read for urbanists who would like to dismantle car culture. I already hated cars for their ecological harm, their tendency to kill and maim people, and their greedy consumption of space, destroying both walkable downtowns on one hand and wild/agricultural rural land on the other. This book opened my eyes to a new reason to hate cars: what a trap they are for poor and justice-involved people who have no choice but to drive.

As this book repeatedly reminds us, driving is mandatory in most of the US. You just couldn't hold down a job without it. There are a few exceptions to this rule among people the authors talked to in New York City, but even there, gentrification has made the neighborhoods well-served by the subway increasingly unaffordable to the folks we're talking about. And as for their interview subjects in the Indianapolis area, fuhgeddaboutit.

But owning a car is expensive. So people get out of prison, having "paid their debt to society," and find themselves in a catch-22: you need a job to have a car, but you need a car to have a job. Not only that, their credit scores are often wrecked from defaulting on the car loan they had before they did time, and sometimes from falling victim to identity theft while in prison. Several people the authors talk to have had to save up hundreds and borrow thousands of dollars to pay off tickets and fines, including tickets they supposedly incurred while in prison: it can be easier to pay up than challenge the DMV on its errors.

As people try to rebuild their lives and credit, they're constantly at risk of going back to jail and having to start over due to a minor mistake. One person the authors talked to had to make three separate two-hour bus trips to get their drivers' license renewed, because each time they had to queue for hours for various bureaucratic tasks, and then rush home before they were finished to make the checkin time at their court-mandated halfway house. Vincent Thompson, a peer researcher for the book, was on parole when stopped by police supposedly for an underinflated tire. He ended up getting evicted, losing his security deposit and all his possessions when the landlord dumped them outside, losing his job, and being jailed for another eight months because the cop found a trivial amount of cannabis, which the state was in the process of decriminalizing at the time.

Poor, justice-involved drivers are also exploited at every turn by both public and private predators: cities gouge them with fees and fines to balance municipal budgets, while banks and car dealers target them with usurious subprime loans, knowing they can repossess the car, make a profit, and go on to the next victim even if the driver can't repay the loan. A final chapter discusses how "smart" cars, camera networks, facial recognition algorithms, and automated license plate readers (ALPRs) ensnare us all in a growing surveillance dragnet, which is especially dangerous for the book's interviewees who are one small mistake from being reincarcerated, but really should concern us all.

At the conclusion, the authors make suggestions for change: focus traffic enforcement on real safety infractions, not catching debtors (and use income-graduated fines), close loopholes around usury laws, remove the backdoor to debtor's prison, fund municipalities through progressive taxation instead of fines, dismantle surveillance, and, the urbanist's favorite one, demolish urban freeways and invest in transit, walking and biking. It's a thoughtful overview of the intersection of car culture and the carceral system, and a call to action. I just wish it had an index.