JOINT CHIEFS OF FICTION
AN ADMIRAL AND A WAR VET WRITE A DYSTOPIAN THRILLER THAT ESCALATES GLOBAL TENSIONS
ADMIRAL JAMES Stavridis had the kind of career for which the term “well-decorated” was coined. Thirty-plus years in the U.S. Navy, including seven as a four-star admiral. Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Grad-school dean. Bestselling author and TED conference speaker on seamanship and geopolitics. Vetted potential running mate for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
None of which, he conceded, qualified him to write fiction.
Stavridis, who retired from the Navy in 2013, has written a clutch of nonfiction books but he’s a serious reader of fiction as well — an admirer of Aravind Adiga, Hilary Mantel and Don DeLillo. So he’d been kicking around the idea for a novel inspired by “The Bedford Incident,” a 1963 novel by Mark Rascovich (later a film starring Sidney Poitier). The book features a conflict at sea between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that threatens to escalate into World War III. Stavridis wanted to write a similar cautionary tale set in the near future involving the U.S. and China.
In the fall of 2018, the admiral took the idea to his editor at Penguin Press, Scott Moyers, and got shut down fast. “He said, ‘Stavridis, you’re a great guy, but you’re not a novelist,’ ” he recalls. “‘But I know a novelist.’ ” Moyers was thinking of Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine officer who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan before channeling that experience into four artful novels, including 2017’s “Dark at the Crossing,” a National Book Award finalist. Thrillers don’t get National Book Award nominations; Ackerman’s style is elliptical and interior, concerned with emotional consequences of armed conflict. While Stavridis was game for a collaboration, Ackerman was hesitant; tales of seafaring and high-level brinksmanship weren’t his thing. “I hadn’t worked with anyone before,” he says. “But I said, ‘Let’s see if we can write the first chapter.’ ”
Over the next year and a half, the two spun together “2034: A Novel of the Next World War,” which imagines a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident between Chinese and U.S. naval ships in the South China Sea that quickly metastasizes into cyberwarfare, global internet outages and the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons. (Sorry, San Diego.)
As in any speculative novel, the vision of the future is intended to speak to the present; Stavridis and Ackerman wanted to serve a warning about American hubris. A Chinese admiral observes that Americans’ “moral certitude, their singleminded determination, their blithe optimism undermined them at this moment as they struggled to find a solution to a problem they didn’t understand.”
Stavridis and Ackerman shared some connections beyond an editor. They met when Stavridis was dean of Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Ackerman studied in the program. They were both briefly Angelenos: Ackerman spent his early childhood in West L.A. and Stavridis was stationed at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in the late ’80’s and early ’90s. And both are veterans, though that didn’t guarantee consensus.
“There can’t be two more different branches of the armed forces veteran Elliot Ackerman, top, and Adm. James Stavridis serve a cautionary tale in “2034.” than the two that are represented on this Zoom call,” Stavridis says. “The surface Navy is really traditional: Go to sea, sit down in the wardroom, white tablecloths —it’s a very genteel part of the business. Elliott was a grunt, a lead-a-squad-of-Marinesinto-combat kind of guy.”
During our video chat, the men are comfortable in their assigned lanes: Stavridis tends to chat up the strategic implications of the novel’s premise, while Ackerman stresses the psychological angle. That distinction played out on the page. Stavridis spitballed the Risk-board scenarios that would keep the plot in motion while Ackerman specialized in the novel’s handful of lead characters, including U.S. and Chinese admirals, a Marine fighter pilot, an Iranian brigadier general and a U.S. national security advisor who works back channels with India to keep the planet intact.
Ackerman wanted to exploit the flaws in each of those characters — the mistakes, the relationship stresses — to emphasize the connection between individual and global anxiety. “Politics is people at the end of the day,” he says.
Both are quick to insist they haven’t written a Tom Clancy/Brad Thor-style military technothriller, though it has the hallmarks of one: brisk plotting, clean prose, whizbang weaponry, scenes of Oval Office realpolitik. What makes “2034” distinct is that it scours out the airport thriller’s easy patriotism, the notion that the United States’ military might affords assured victory or moral certainty. In “2034,” America has endured a one-term Pence presidency, climate change has reset the global power structure and an octogenarian Putin maintains his grip on Russia. Stavridis wanted the novel’s mood to more closely resemble the dystopian novels he admires: “Station Eleven,” “The Circle,” “The Road.”
Ackerman, meanwhile, wanted to highlight America as an empire in rapid decline. “In the 20th century, we fought in two world wars that we didn’t begin but that we sure as hell finished,” he says. “We showed up at the end, at relatively little cost for us, finished those wars and negotiated the peace. Early in the writing of this book, we knew we wanted to tell a story that had that thesis in it. We know who starts this war: America and China. Who finishes it?”
That’s the novel’s speculativefiction question, but it’s also a reallife conundrum. The United States and China have been engaged in low-boil cyberwarfare for a decade, which Stavridis says is likely to accelerate. “This shadow war in cyber is real,” he says. “Russia is kind of a player, but not at the level of the U.S. or China. That’ll be a big part of the next 15 years.” Stavridis might have sounded the alarm in another nonfiction book, an extension of his two professional memoirs and his authoritative history of sea power. But both writers agree it wouldn’t have the same impact.
“Look at the great tragedies in American history,” says Ackerman. “Pearl Harbor, what was it? A failure of imagination. One of the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission Report was that Sept. 11 was a failure of imagination on the part of intelligence agencies and law enforcement. You can argue that this pandemic we’re going through is yet another failure of imagination. At a certain point, imagination does become a national-security imperative.”
TH E template is familiar: a young woman, miserable, falls hard for an attractive, withholding man. He’s older, a writer, with “cruel” gray eyes and large hands, holding forth at a gallery opening. When she makes a casual self-deprecating comment about not understanding art — positioning herself already as the pupil — he responds earnestly, “Isn’t it our job to understand: why these objects, in this particular room?” and the stage is set. I know this guy, thinks the reader. He’s going to destroy her.
So begins Irish writer Megan Nolan’s wrenching debut, “Acts of Desperation,” a chronicle of a sinister, deeply imbalanced and unsettlingly familiar romantic relationship. Nolan is likely to draw facile comparisons to her brilliant compatriot Sally Rooney, whose work also turns a spotlight on power dynamics in relationships, but that move won’t do justice to the darkness in this book. If we must go Irish, a writer like Kevin Barry, who limns murky, maudlin disasters of love, is closer literary kin to Nolan. For this is not a novel about coeds. It’s a book about looking for your own stuttered, partial reflection in the hall of mirrors that is a narcissist’s affection. It’s about chasing oblivion in the whirling, flaming speedball of heavy booze and violent sex.
Not long after the opening scene, Nolan’s unnamed narrator gives herself completely to the Irish Danish writer Ciaran, whom she considers on sight to be “better than me in both essential and superficial ways.” In the background looms Freja, Ciaran’s lissome, Nordic ex-girlfriend, who is trying to win him back. (And does, briefly — a betrayal that raises the stakes.) As in many stories of fragile, possessive hetero love, an equally tormenting relationship arguably takes place between women. Freja undermines the narrator in her frequent emails to Ciaran: “She’s cute I can see, but a little chubby for you, no?” When Ciaran is out, the narrator finds herself three years deep in Freja’s Instagram, looking at her collarbones as she polishes off a second bottle of wine.
But the most compelling negotiation in the book is between warring parts of the narrator herself. Subject to Ciaran’s moods and casual cruelty, the woman begins to split apart. On the one hand, she knows she must do whatever she can to keep his love. On the other hand, she knows something isn’t right.
“Acts of Desperation” is a first-person narrative with a confessional tone. And the narrator, in her very early 20s, feels painfully young at times. Here and there, the reader finds herself thinking, Snap out of it! Ciaran isn’t even that great! Then remembers that the details, even the man, are not the point.
Our narrator is lost to a devotion that borders on the religious. Here, Nolan often slips into cliché, drawing analogies to redemption or purification through love. Ciaran’s body is a “site of prayer” and love a “force which would clean me.” Leaning on the tired old idea of women as “dirty,” she writes, with excessive neatness: “I knew that if I could be smaller, smaller, less and less, if I could be tidied,” she writes, “then he would love me fully and properly.”
But elsewhere Nolan’s writing gleams with dark precision. Cooking and cleaning their apartment, her narrator realizes, “Living with him forced me to treat myself in a way I was not able to alone.” Of Ciaran, she writes, “He looked like an
illustration of superiority, like propaganda for the idea of a man.” Certain truths are dropped unceremoniously, as when the narrator refers to herself as a functional object for men, “safe and useful as a sink.”
The action of the novel takes place between 2011 and 2015, but the narrator’s future self interjects throughout, in dispatches that read like they were written with some distance and, blessedly, some therapy. In these asides, she tries to prove that being in thrall to this kind of self-destructive romance is a choice. She cynically attests that she has passed through the “sordid checkpoints of the wounded woman,” suffered things “objectively worse” than the harrowing events she describes with Ciaran. But “female suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are only looking for attention,” Nolan writes, and she refuses to lay out all of her character’s trauma for the reader’s breezy consumption.
In these and other sections, Nolan performs her feminist fluency and conveys all the while a sense of fatigue, an acknowledgment that this is both new and not new. The decision to hold in suspicion the very form she is enacting is what makes the book refreshing and complex. What “Acts of Desperation” illuminates best is the chasm, sadly still enormous, between feminist politics and personal predicaments of love, sex and romance.
The novel is a powerful counterweight to the notion that young women today are free to define themselves apart from men. Nolan shows that as long as we are grappling with ideas about women’s desirability authored by men, women are in a sense realized by the male gaze. Remembering herself on a date, high on her own hotness, the narrator thinks, “I was strawberry ice cream, blue sky. I smelled so good it was crazy.” But the question the book raises echoes disturbingly even after it’s over: Does participating willingly in your own degradation lessen its impact?
There are many stories currently circulating about relationships like the one Nolan writes about, and I marvel at my bottomless appetite for them. It isn’t only prurience, nor simply that it makes me feel less alone. It is satisfying to see a young female narrator wrest control of the story of her debasement, to show both its specificity and its utter sameness, her victimhood and her complicity. Each story carries with it some hope that we might understand, slightly better or perhaps just differently with each iteration: Why these objects, in this particular room.
Aron is the author of “Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love.”