We might be Living “Like This”

You Don’t Have to Live Like This

By Benjamin Markovits

In the summer of 2005, a hurricane tore through the Gulf Coast, and due to the negligence and incompetence of many people, more than a thousand people lost their lives. Billions of dollars were lost too. The post-Katrina era brought people around the country who wanted to help. They came with volunteer groups, or took Highway 10 from the east looking to start over. I was one of them, fresh off a bachelor’s degree, and determined to help in any way possible, but I was also there to find meaning and purpose in my first attempts of post-college life.

The author, Benjamin Markovits, a former professional basketball player “who left an unpromising career” in basketball to study the Romantics, spent time growing up in the South, but also Oxford and Berlin. For his seventh novel, which is compelling, and timely, he chooses another American city struck by tragedy- Detroit.

It is set in a similar time as my story, a post-2000 election malaise, where the people of our generation distrust our government, but are each trying to find their own way to make a difference. There are a lot of problems in the world, but it is also hard to make it in academia, in Markovits’ fictional world, and apparently our reality mirrors this, if you ask any of your adjunct professor friends.

Marney, a man who grew up in Louisiana, and did everything anybody ever asked of him, is Markovits’ protagonist. He ends up at Yale, where he meets the elite elitists. There is nothing particular interesting or ambitious about his time there, and at a ten year reunion, he seems more lost than ever before.

Marney is swayed by a gregarious college friend, who sees him as lost and willing to drop everything (which is not much), and move to Detroit to start a new colony. To the Yalies, it will hopefully be some kind of gentrification on steroids, seen through the prism of alleged social impact.

When Marney arrives in Detroit, he starts to meet the other characters who have descended upon what was once one of the largest, most promising cities in America full of industry and innovation. Unfortunately, the Motor City became the textbook case for turn of the 21st Century deindustrialization.

Marney probably expected to be joined by ambitious, young progressives determined to build a new city equal for all. Maybe, in this newly developed Detroit, extreme poverty would be left behind. The supposed best minds of urban policy and re-development would descend upon the Motor City and create walkable neighborhoods, and robust bike lines.

In Markovits’ book, there were some of those urban policy intellectuals, but most of his neighbors were a rag tag group that made up a new type of motley crew of Richard Florida’s young professionals. They had libertarian and conservative viewpoints about what cities should be and should not, and they did not necessarily co-exist with the Detroit-ers who lived there before this new age migration.

Markovits masterfully captures the distrust between the people who lived there for decades, and their new neighbors. These feelings of purpose and meaning that may conflict with the residents hopes, dreams, and many fears, was a familiar sentiment to the post-Katrina New Orleans era.

The author also forces us to wrestle with the concept of what one person considers an act of kindness, and service to others, can be seen as aloofness, and disservice for others. As a twenty-two year old attempting to find meaning in my work, I wanted to feel like I was making a difference during my Americorps stint in New Orleans, and the years following, but it sometimes conflicted with the dreams and hopes of the residents of the city.

When change occurs, it has to disrupt the status quo, and that can often create tension. Like Markovits’ character, Marney, and his friends of Detroit re-developers, in post-Katrina New Orleans, we expected change to happen quickly. We were young and naive, the kind of people who can pick up, and move somewhere in the hopes of a better beginning. We wanted something better and more equal for the residents of the Crescent City, but we also found meaning and purpose in our own lives. It was an act of service driven by selfish motives.

These are the issues that bubble to the surface in Markovits’ book. Marney’s indecision can be incredibly frustrating, and at times, I grew frustrated with his decision-making, but that just made the book more engrossing. A novel is supposed to make you feel something, and for any of us who spent time trying to help a city rebuild to maybe help ourselves, this book is worth picking up.