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Benjamin Markovits is the author of You Don’t Have to Live Like This, forthcoming from Harper. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study Romanticism. Since then he has taught high-school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, and published seven novels, including a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron.
You Don't Have to Live Like This
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$6.49
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ISBN-13:
9780062376626
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication date: 07/07/2015
- Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 400
- File size: 705 KB
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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.
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Publishers Weekly
05/18/2015British 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. (July)
Washington Post
With the national media roiling with articles about race, justice and class, particularly in that struggling Michigan city, this story could not be more timely… Markovits is a master at describing the devastated and deserted streets of Detroit.Prospect
Bold and brilliant…Benjamin Markovits follows Charles Dickens and Tom Wolfe in creating a vividly real urban backdrop against which a fine, provocative story can be told.USA Today
As up-to-the-minute as a cable network’s “Breaking News” bulletin, though far more thoughtful and better examined…So few fiction writers deal directly with street-level economic and cultural conflict in the present day that you’re grateful YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS exists at all.Booklist
Markovits shines a much-needed light on the plight of Detroit and the racial inequalities, prejudices, and privileges that plague our nation.The Independent
This is fiction writing that is alive in your hand…Markovits’ is a voice as attuned to the soul as it is to the barrios and hoods, the kind that forms synaptic connections without ever seeming to try.The Spectator
A subtle and finely poised novel…shrewdly observant…Markovits uses Detroit as a rebuke to certain forms of American idealism, and does so with nuance…Characters are gradually deepened and made complex, leaving the reader complicit in a degree of judgmental behavior.Financial Times
Compelling…Markovits is a spot-on observer of speech patterns and subconsciously revealing behavioral tics, and it’s the portrayal of complex relationships that keeps the plot moving. The novel is populated by intriguing characters…a bold work of fiction with a firm real-world moral.Literary Review
Terrifically readable ... a sweeping story of gentrification, class war and racism in America.Karl Taro Greenfeld
You Don’t Have to Live Like This takes a match to a house full of gas fumes. It made me feel like I had experienced a series of episodes I would normally only encounter via the news...a heartbreaking portrait of criminal justice.Telegraph (London)
A very smart book, with vividly drawn characters and densely woven themesLaura Miller
An impressive new novel…Perhaps Markovits’s fictional Obama, who makes the speech that gives the novel its title, is right that Americans don’t have to live ‘like this,’ divided and distrustful, but it will take more than cheap real estate and internet utopianism to make change possible.Lucy Scholes
A considered examination of tense race relations.Christian Lorentzen
Markovits’s prose is clean and restrained, and his ear for the way his characters speak is rarely off.Sunday Herald Scotland
Entertaining, insightful, humorous yet of serious purpose. This is a very good novel…Marnier is a fine creation.Kirkus Reviews
2015-04-15A wayward academic tries to make a fresh start emotionally and professionally in economically devastated Detroit. Greg "Marny" Marnier, the narrator of this sophisticated if earnest novel, is a Yale grad who's spent his post-college career in a go-nowhere adjunct teaching gig in Wales. At a class reunion he reconnects with Robert, a wealthy investor who invites him to return stateside to take part in Starting-From-Scratch-in-America, a scheme to fix up houses on 600 acres of abandoned Detroit land investors have purchased. As a history teacher, Marny can't avoid thinking in pioneer metaphors: this "New Jamestown" attracts a pell-mell batch of hippies, tea partiers, do-gooders, and folks just eager to live off the grid. But while the effort attracts national attention—President Barack Obama drops in for a visit and Marny gets roped into a pickup basketball game with him—the (mostly black) locals tend to see the (mostly white) migrants as an occupying force. Marny is a likable if naïve bridge-builder, finding common ground with Nolan, a tough-talking single dad, and pursuing a relationship with Gloria, a schoolteacher. But it gives nothing away to say that Starting-From-Scratch-in-America doesn't quite work out as planned, and the novel echoes Marny's disappointment that a community with a clean slate couldn't shrug off its old baggage about economics and race. Indeed, Markovits implies that the bonds that hold together communities are frustratingly weak (the first sign the colony is collapsing involves a stolen iPhone). Markovits gamely works to make this a realistic and nuanced portrait of modern-day Detroit while keeping the plot moving with some humor and romance, and he's careful not to make the city's problems simplistically black and white. But the story does bog down in a mass of representative characters. An overly busy exploration of white privilege and new money colliding with the old economy.