Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century

Reviewer: Donal O’donoghue Recently re-issued to tie in with the film release (the book’s cover, an image of Frances Mcdormand in character, has no room for the weighty subtitle), Jessica Bruder’s 2017 best-seller is an immersive work that chronicles those ‘houseless (as opposed to ‘homeless’) Americans who live their lives on the road in all makes and shapes of trailers and vehicles. It is, in many ways, even more timely now than it was then: not just a vision of what America is, but with global corporations increasingly running the show, what might also happen to the rest of us.

Bruder, an award-winning journalist who also teaches at New York’s Columbia University, spent three years and travelled 15,000 miles, in researching and writing Nomadland between 2013 and 2016. Like many of her subjects, she christened her van with a cheesy nickname (Halen as in Van Halen) and lived for periods in various campgrounds and parking lots up and down the country, from North Dakota to California, moving with the weather and the seasons, following her nomads. These, in the main, are white, older women, who have for various reasons –personal, economic or otherwise – opted for a life on the road.

Linda May is effectively the book’s central character (in the film, the central protagonist, played by Mcdormand, is a fictional creation, but May, and other reallife people from Bruder’s book, appear as fictionalised versions of themselves). May is a 64-year-old grandmother who tows her home (where she lives with her dog, Coco): a tiny trailer she calls ‘the Squeeze Inn’. Other characters (in all senses of the word) include Bob Wells, who swapped a life stocking shelves for life on the tarmac, setting up a website to preach the gospel that less can be more.

The book’s embrace is epic, shifting from personal stories to big issues such as the gig economy, the impact of the Great Recession and the ever increasing influence and power of global corporations. Many of the people Bruder met worked seasonally with Amazon’s Camperforce – low-paid, onerous work – but politics is rarely part of their conversation. Nomadland, an absorbing if scattergun work, a portrait of a community (or sub-culture) on the rise in the US, where retirement is elusive for many, financially unviable in an economy where pensions are out of the reach of the left behind. And the way of the nomad could be a vision of the global future.