Reviews

• Detroit is an enigma. Outside the US, it is portrayed as a ghost city, abandoned buildings everywhere and neither a body nor a job in sight. Nothing typifies this vision more than Michigan Central Station, wind ripping through the empty halls. It is post-apocalyptic. So when Benjamin Markovits presents us with Greg Marnier (Marny to his friends), an under-achieving academic looking to live in an urban redevelopment zone in Detroit, it fires the imagination. Marny is fleeing a dead end job in Aberystwyth (a Welsh backwater) and his only interest in Detroit is that the redevelopment is being run by his college friend Robert. He has no plan to become economically useful, he has no skills to contribute. Literally, he will just sit in a house and wait for the area to redevelop and house prices to rise. Maybe help out with a bit of substitute teaching to take the edge off the boredom. Certainly, it seems that Marny has been fed the same Detroit propaganda as us. He explains that the city’s population is a third of what it once was. He erroneously explains that this means that for every house that is occupied, its two neighbours are empty. Marny stocks up on guns before moving to Detroit and once there, spends an age summoning up the courage to leave Richard’s house. There are scary people on the streets. There are striking similarities between this novel and Kate Grenville’s Secret River, a story of early settlers in New South Wales. Robert, Marny and the other white settlers seem to have assumed Detroit to be Terra Nullius – empty land waiting to be colonised. The existing residents are mostly invisible, presenting themselves only when a problem arises – the need to turn off electricity, for example, or in the aftermath of a crime. And like Secret River, the characters are conflicted about whether to interact with the old residents or whether to drive them away and live completely apart. There are many themes at play; themes of power, money, destiny, crime, justice. Tied up with all this, there is the question of race. Because, when you are looking at any one of the themes, you have the white people on one side, and the black people on the other – with Barack Obama sitting godlike over them all. Obama holds everyone in his thrall – he inspires our protagonists, many of them delve into their pasts to claim to know him, their plans are supposed to embody his vision, they claim him as one of their own. The main characters are interesting – particularly the axis between Marny, Gloria (a substitute teacher) and Nolan (a rough diamond). They are all flawed but all have redeeming features. Most crucially, all of them develop as Robert’s social experiment unfolds. If there is a fault with the novel, it is that it is too long and a bit confusing. Too often, Marny finds himself in the company of people we might have met previously, but who we barely remember. Some of the characters, at least, could have been erased or merged with no great loss. It can be hard to keep track of where Marny is at any given moment. Marny seems to find himself in situations where people get hurt but even with careful scrutiny it is hard to see exactly how it happened – or why. The ending is so confused as to be almost impenetrable. As to whether it is an accurate or fair portrayal of modern-day Detroit, I have my doubts. A glance at Wikipedia shows that whilst the population of central Detroit might have fallen, if the metropolitan regions are added in, the city is as populous as it ever was. There are shiny buildings in the CBD and General Motors still has its HQ in Detroit. There is crime, yes, and racial tension. But Detroit is not quite the abandoned city that some might have us believe. The title itself is a conundrum: is it Robert trying to sell his urban regeneration, or is it us telling Robert we want no part in his vision? Overall, and on balance, this is a good novel that has enough to keep the reader thinking. Perhaps three and a half stars...

• My only strong critique of this book is the one dimensional and under-developed portrayal of one of the main characters, Nolan. Nolan remains an emotionally distant and somewhat more crytptic figure throughout the book, whose anti-racist politics are critical to the storyline, but remain under-engaged and left vague. Unfortunately, I think this sells short the seemingly clear intention of the book to demonstrate to white or dominant cultural readers how enmeshed normative cultural logics are with structural racism. That the floundering ethics of the white psyche of the main character, Marny, is so fully elaborated but the black character placed in the story to reveal white racism to itself is himself essentially overlooked... does quite a blow to the integrity and power of the narrative. I enjoyed this story but I'd say it stops short of it's full potential and renders its engagement in racial politics somewhat hipster/surface. In this way, the narrative fits into the trap of re-centering whiteness while attempting an alternative.

• Had potential just didn't go anywhere.....

• Interesting in many ways, but needed one more edit as it dragged somewhat in the middle.

• Marnie, the main character in this novel is essentially likeable yet he never seems to get anywhere. Detroit, the other main character is a terrifying place - not being American, I can't volunteer an opinion on whether it's true to life. It seems quite possible. The story contains a myriad of tiny biographies of people of various kinds who have moved, as Marnie has, to Detroit to take advantage of cheap broken down housing and some of whom are drawn towards the idea of building a new and kinder America, a social experiment driven by one of Marnie's old college friends with lots of money. While there is a richness to the detail of the very minor characters, there is something slightly baffling about the main players - perhaps because they are all seen through Marnie's nonjudgmental and somewhat naive eye. It's quite a slow read but it held my attention. The writing is efficient rather than beautiful but it gets the point across and makes it bearable to keep on through a great deal of minute detail. I'd say don't read it if you need a fast pace and/or an exciting plot but do read it if you can handle a lot of detail and a steady build up of place and time and you don't need a sharp ending.

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