Detroit spinning
Post-industrial, racially divided America is the setting for an ambitious literary novel that isn’t afraid to be readable
Benjamin Markovits is a German-american novelist who lives in London. He has written a trilogy of clever and well-crafted novels about Byron. As a young man he played professional basketball in Germany, an unusual career move for a novelist. He now teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, which is par for the course for novelists today – all the more so since sales of literary novels have mostly plummeted, especially since public libraries cut back on book purchases. An editor at a big London firm recently told a friend of mine that some of the novels they publish now sell as few as 200 copies. Fifty years ago they would have sold between 2,000 and 3,000 to public libraries alone.
Happily, Markovits is innocent of one of the vices characteristic of academic teachers of creative writing: his novel is written to be read, not taught. Admittedly it offers much material for discussion, for it deals with an interesting socio-economic-political question: the problem of reviving a failed industrial city, in this case Detroit, which was to the motor car what Glasgow was to shipbuilding.
But, though Markovits is clearly fascinated by the problem and has much of interest to say about it, he is concerned first of all with his characters, and there is a huge cast of them. Moreover, he never forgets that the novel must – as EM Forster somewhat gloomily admitted – tell a story, and he tells a good one which comes properly to a climax that seems inevitable, even though, like much that appears inevitable in retrospect, it is brought about by a series of accidents and misunderstandings.
The narrator, Greg Marnier, known as Marnie, returns in his mid-thirties to the United States after a desultory academic career teaching history at Aberystwyth. At a college reunion he meets an old friend, Robert, who has a proposition for him. After Yale, Robert went into finance, started his own hedge fund, and then sold it for a monstrous sum. He has now been buying up derelict property in Detroit, a city emptied of its inhabitants. What we call “gentrification” is the way to urban renewal. He speaks of creating a community, just as the Pilgrim Fathers and the other early colonists in what is now the US did. He invites Marnie to join him, move in, take over a house, and act eventually as the historian of the enterprise. Marnie, at a loose end, agrees.
The venture is exciting. It seems idealistic, and Robert is indeed an idealist, though also one backed by, and in cahoots with, banking giant Goldman Sachs.
Still, the idea he is selling is sufficiently attractive for president Barack Obama to agree to attend one of his fund-raising events, after which, in the yard of Robert’s house, he will play basketball in the snow. (There is a lot of weather in the novel, and Markovits is very good on weather.)
However, things don’t go smoothly. Ravaged Detroit was a black city; the incomers, the new colonists, are mostly white and middle class. They are resented, and they are also nervous. They organise security patrols and one of the first things Marnie is told is “get yourself a gun”. Actually, he soon acquires two, but he also gets a black girlfriend, Gloria, an idealistic schoolteacher. So he has a foot in both camps; he is a man caught in the middle. He makes friends, sort of, anyway, with an
angry black artist called Nathan, who distrusts and resents Robert’s scheme and all connected with it. Moreover, Marnie himself begins to have doubts. Robert’s intentions are no doubt honourable, but why are huge quantities of aluminium being stored in a warehouse rented by Goldman Sachs? Is the new Detroit version of the early colonists’ New Plymouth a front for rogue capitalism and exploitation?
The climax comes with a misunderstanding and a fight which leaves Nathan first in hospital and then in jail. There is a trial at which Marnie is a reluctant and confused witness, understandably confused, partly because his memory of events is not clear, partly because court proceedings distort meaning. This is very well done.
So, for the most part, is the novel. The pace is admittedly slow, and scenes tend to go on after their point has been made. Not all the characters come to life, and not all are convincing, but this is venial, for they are presented to us as seen by Marnie, and he is unsure of himself and often confused. But the novel’s merits far outweigh its defects (and anyway, no long novel is ever perfect; none without its tedious passages). With considerable skill, Markovits marries the social and the personal or individual. His picture of Detroit is compelling; his understanding of the roots of conflict persuasive.
One critic compared Markovits as a prose stylist to Scott Fitzgerald. I don’t see that. Fitzgerald’s prose sings. Markovits writes in a style that is no more than serviceable; he is more like John O’hara than Fitzgerald. But that is no bad thing. O’hara in his early stories and novels had his finger on the pulse of urban America in the years of the Great Depression. Markovits gives us post-industrial, racially divided America in the grip of Finance Capitalism. He does so very well, and this is no mean achievement.
One critic compared Markowits to F Scott Fitzgerald