Days of reckoning
Jonathan Dee mines the uncertainty of the years between 9/11 and the financial crash for this astute study of small-town America and those in thrall to wealth, writes Lucinda Rosenfeld
Jonathan Dee’s latest novel, The Locals, begins with a 33-page monologue in the voice of a two-bit scam artist wandering around midtown Manhattan in the days after the Twin Towers come down, as angry and profane as if he’s just stepped off the set of a Martin Scorsese film. Unmoved by events downtown, this narrator rails against a bus driver, the clerks at the Morningside Heights post office and the idiots (himself included) who have unknowingly handed over their life savings to a far more successful con man. The section is ominously named “Chapter 0,” and readers will be forgiven for thinking they are embarking on a Delillo-esque novel about 9/11 à la Falling Man.
In fact, The Locals turns out to take place in the anxious, foreboding years after 9/11 and before the Great Recession, and to revolve around the tensions between townies and weekenders in the fictional Berkshires town of Howland, Massachusetts. The flawed hero is not the grifter of the opening chapter but one Mark Firth, a good-looking, occasionally wise but gullible building contractor from Howland who has lost his own mini-fortune to the same fraudulent financial adviser. Mark is a perfect mark, and after the lowlife grifter meets him in the empty offices of the lawyer handling their class action suit, he makes off with Mark’s credit card and family photos and disappears from the book forever.
Dee then moves the action – along with now twice-burned Mark – back up the Taconic State Parkway to Howland, a quaint-seeming town just down the road from Great Barrington. Thanks in part to a famous chef who has opened a fancy restaurant on the site of a shuttered Benihana, with a 16-course tasting menu featuring Tamworth pigs and orazio fennel, Howland is experiencing a surge in popularity among wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians. But behind the charming facade, life for the locals isn’t as quaint as it looks.
Dee uses a roving, limited omniscience to give voice to a wide array of Howland’s residents. Cop, nurse, teacher, carpenter, postmaster, organic farmer “selling five-dollar tomatoes to weekenders who knew the value neither of a tomato nor of five dollars” – they’re all here, sometimes in quick snapshots, at other times in more depth. Together they provide a panoramic view of a local population reinforcing the idea that most people, no matter where they live or what their socioeconomic status, are selfish and semi-delusional if generally well meaning. Dee astutely captures how claustrophobia and the comforts of home can coexist. “It was a small town,” he writes, “and everybody was constantly in everybody’s business despite a deep Yankee presumption of self-sufficiency.”
Then a stranger comes to town: Philip Hadi, a Manhattan hedge fund titan who, freaked out by 9/11, has moved his wife and family to Howland year round. Dee paints a persuasive portrait of an affectless technocrat, neither friendly nor unfriendly, neither left wing nor right wing, who does an adequate job of imitating the locals yet continues to wear bespoke white dress shirts beneath his Patagonia fleeces. As it turns out, Hadi doesn’t simply want to live in Howland. The town is facing financial troubles, in part because its only historic mansion (where Mark’s wife works) has finally achieved landmark status and fallen off the tax rolls. Now, playing the role of beneficent billionaire like a small-town Michael Bloomberg, Hadi wants to “help.”
After the first selectman (head of the local government) dies of a heart attack, Hadi takes over the job
The Locals is a quietly engrossing narrative that dishes out its food for thought in sly, quotable lines
sans salary and, in order to avoid raising taxes on its citizens, begins privately supporting both Howland’s storefronts and its infrastructure. To Mark, hired to install security equipment in his home, Hadi is “a guy who had everything and from whom nothing could be taken away” – and who can therefore do no wrong. In fact, Hadi’s own success as a businessman inspires Mark to begin buying up foreclosed properties and turning himself into a landlord and developer. (We all know how that’s going to end, circa 2008.)
In his portrait of an urban sophisticate who relocates to the country, Dee can sometimes resemble a discursive, more cynical Richard Russo. But the book is ultimately less concerned with Hadi himself than with his influence on the unhappy, rivalrous and dysfunctional Firth family. In addition to Mark, whose repeated financial risks antagonise his wife, there is his brother, Gerry, a resentful libertarian who has dumped his bride at the altar and is currently sleeping with the married receptionist at the Century 21 office where he works as a real estate agent; and their sister Candace, a rebellious science teacher whose seventh-grade class awkwardly includes the bratty daughter of her married ex-lover. (A fourth Firth sibling has checked out of the sibling melodrama and moved to Colorado.) Aging parents who sleep on dirty sheets in nearby Pittsfield complete the unpretty picture. Mom is showing steady signs of Alzheimer’s, Dad can’t deal with it and neither can their sons.
If to Mark, Hadi represents the lure of financial independence, to Gerry he is a fledgling autocrat. Using the pseudonym PC Barnum, Gerry begins writing an anti-tax, anti-political correctness blog that contains echoes of both Bernie Sanders and the Tea Party, in which he warns that Hadi is slowly but surely amassing power and threatening the freedom of Howland’s citizens. He would seem to have a point when Hadi announces that “frankly democracy doesn’t really work anymore” and, later, that “consensus really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
Reading these passages, I couldn’t help wondering whether Dee had finished writing The Locals in the Obama era or the early Trump one. Certainly, there are echoes of the 2016 election insofar as the majority of Howland’s townspeople seem unquestioningly to equate Hadi’s fortune with virtue. There is also the book’s focus on the rural white working class, who appear simultaneously to loathe and to admire the cosmopolitan elites who pass through their town and their lives.
As the tension builds, protests are planned. Yet for all that the book gestures at a kind of political allegory, it shies away from the capital-s Scene it seems to promise and tapers away into anticlimax. Even more confoundingly, Dee concludes the novel in much the way he begins it, with an episode that feels unconnected from the main action.
Still, The Locals is a quietly engrossing narrative that dishes out its food for thought in sly, quotable lines – as when Gerry, trying to “bring his own life in line with his political principles,” determines to be humbler: “The distinction between humility and self-loathing was, in practice, a slippery one.” Or, my favourite: “Tough times brought out the bad side of people, it seemed, and this internet was like some giant bathroom wall where you could just scrawl whatever hate you liked.” ■ © NYT 2017