A Novel Imagines the Next Wave of Refugees: Americans

2 A.M. IN LITTLE AMERICA
By Ken Kalfus

A couple of observer of the social and political lifetime of the USA has famous that our nation feels as if it’s drifting towards civil warfare. We’re already divided into competing tribes of activists, officers and media personalities. Occasionally, in locations as various as Portland, Ore.; Kenosha, Wis.; and Charlottesville, Va., these divisions have produced precise avenue battles, with bloodshed and misplaced lives.

In Ken Kalfus’s deeply intriguing new novel, “2 A.M. in Little America,” the following American civil warfare has already taken place. The individuals of the USA have grow to be the world’s latest and largest cohort of refugees, following Syrians and Salvadorans and plenty of others into the cross-border and transoceanic routes of mass migration and diaspora. Because the novel opens, the People residing in exile in an unnamed nation type an underclass of low-wage labor, exploited and vilified by the locals. The refugees carry the stigma of their Americanness, and studiously keep away from each other’s firm. “We have been humiliated by what had occurred; we might have reminded one another solely of our grief and our disgrace,” Kalfus writes. The uprooted People can see that the locals have the deepest contempt for “how far our nation had fallen.”

Kalfus is the writer of a half-dozen novels and story collections, and his fiction typically makes use of the occasions of the day (9/11, Chernobyl, the Iraq warfare) to create mordant satires and allegories about trendy life. In “2 A.M. in Little America” he turns the vanity of his novel right into a tense and sometimes lovely work of reflection on the American current. His protagonist, Ron Patterson, is an apolitical man exiled, as a younger grownup, from a metropolis someplace within the American heartland, the infamous web site of a number of the ugliest incidents of the civil warfare. Patterson is a loner, and as with so many immigrants and refugees in the actual United States, his authorized standing is precarious in his adopted nation. He’s pressured to look at and pay attention as anti-immigrant activists specific their grievances. “A MILLION UNEMPLOYED IS A MILLION IMMIGRANTS TOO MANY,” reads an airplane banner advert. The tables have turned on the American individuals, and Kalfus milks the irony in some methods which might be predictable, and in others which might be actually stunning.

At first, Patterson’s exile is a deeply existential one, targeted on an obsession with a lady he thinks he sees in every single place in his adopted metropolis. Then he’s pressured to flee to one more nation, the place he settles in an “enclave” of People. On this Little America, he’s thrust right into a political drama. Competing militias of American exiles are intent on persevering with their internecine warfare on international floor, and we be taught concerning the atrocities each side dedicated again dwelling. Anybody aware of the violence inflicted by the USA and its proxies in varied imperial adventures across the globe will acknowledge the inspiration for Kalfus’s imagined again story — most notably, the crimes on the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. As soon as once more, the chickens have come dwelling to roost.

What’s extra fascinating in “Little America” is an thought Kalfus repeats typically: that the displaced People have a “look” and manner of being that units them other than the locals. Nostalgic for the consumerism of dwelling, they construct crude replicas of big-box retailers, full with their acquainted colour schemes. They share a ardour for strolling canines. “Folks wore their garments within the American model,” Kalfus writes, “and their faces have been recognizably American.” But when the nation they got here from was a world melting pot, what does an “American” face appear to be? One needs Kalfus had explored this concept additional. Race and sophistication conflicts are on the coronary heart of the real-life dysfunction People live, however Kalfus elides these variations on this work. Nonetheless, “2 A.M. in Little America” is a extremely readable, taut novel. It pulls the reader into its world, and means that many fascinating human problems await us on the finish of the story known as the USA of America.