Book Report: Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery
[I’m lucky enough to be a member of two rockin’ book clubs. Since I often find myself marveling at how thoughtful and fun our the discussions are, I thought I would share them with the universe. Enjoy!]
The Book: Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Economic Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery (2008)
The Goods: Liberation is speculative fiction that contemplates the aftermath of a complete American economic collapse. (Mind you, this novel was published before – and anticipated some of – the recession we actually saw this past year: creepy.) It’s a dystopian – but amazingly hopeful – vision of America where the institution of slavery has been re-established, starving communities struggle to rebuild, the New Sioux roam the plains, and New York is ruled by a villain named the Aardvark. It’s also a rousing adventure, and the action revolves around a gang of supercriminals called the Slick Six, who reunite to restore law and order. (Genre/Pynchon fans: If that doesn’t sound rad, I really don’t know how you define radness.)
The Report: This is the second time I’ve read Liberation (I interviewed the author earlier this year) and I was excited and a little nervous to discuss it with other readers, many of whom have much less of a predilection for sci-fi/pulp than I do. So I’m glad to report that book club was pretty enthusiastic about Liberation! It’s an ambitious novel – balancing a very thoughtful, smart consideration of the collapse of the USA with an entertaining heist plot (the supercrime, as one reader noted, essentially ends up being getting a check written) – and everyone was duly impressed at how well Slattery manages to pull it off.
Thoughts from the collective book club brain:
Slattery’s representation of slavery. In Liberation, the re-emergence of slavery is a very contemporary version of indentured servitude/forced labor, rather than that of the “peculiar institution” of 18th and 19th century slavery in America. This felt unexpected for some readers because Slattery is so effective at illustrating how the unfinished business of the Civil War continues to haunt us to this day. It’s a rather chilling proposition to think of people of means selling themselves into slavery because they suddenly find themselves with no resources and nowhere to go. As one reader commented, when two of the novel’s protagonists sell themselves into slavery in the strawberry fields of California, they’re living the worst imaginable migrant labor experience. It’s terribly moving.
This is not apocalypse porn. We seem to be inundated with books and movies obsessed with the end of the world, and many of them are highly invested in the spectacle of the apocalypse. Liberation stands out as a novel less interested in exploiting the pain of catastrophe than contemplating how communities rebuild. We spent a good bit of time discussing this point, and also about how we take for granted that America, as we know it, will continue in something approximating perpetuity. Slattery is particularly adept at cutting right to the heart of this assumption, illustrating that this grand project of the American union is no less subject to the same forces that have taken down other empires in the past. What Slattery does so well is avoid so much narrative hand-wringing about that and instead gets to the business of imagining (and I do mean ‘imagining’) some rebuilding.
The Aardvark. We loved this bad guy. (Ehren particularly loved him, thanks to his theory that he’s a nod to The Mule of Asimov’s Foundation series.) We loved how Slattery suggested that his rise to power made him more superbureacrat than supercriminal, and he ends up increasingly concerned with governing (albeit, tyrannically) than criminaling. (“He’s like Giuliani!”)
Librarians will thrive after the apocalypse. Along with the party-loving inhabitants of Las Vegas (a nice nod to the tribes of Burning Man), the librarians of the New York Public Library find that the apocalypse gives them what they always wanted: the perfect, cloistered relationship with their books. That the public library continued to function was among our favorite details of the book.
Also awesome: the really reasoned and compassionate treatment of Marco-as-child-soldier-and-assassin; the heartbreaking relationships between the Slick Six; the Assassin; Maggot Boy Johnson (we wanted more of him!); Asheville as the last free state; the way music and other cultural products become central to the way people re-defined themselves in the wake of national collapse; and the gelato served by our book club host.
Less-than-thrilled about: Some concerns about The New Sioux and connotations about cultural essentialism; Maggot Boy Johnson (we wanted more of him!); the way the novel seemed to lose some narrative momentum by the end; and Tyrone Fly (his appearances didn’t quite work for some of us).
Fine Linkage: A number neat-o items/oddities reminded book club readers of Liberation, or vice versa, during this month of reading. Here are a few:
- ‘Recession Armada’ Of Empty Freighters Floats Off Asian Coast
- The Take (Documentary)
- Swimming Cities of Serenissima
Next month: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote!
