Divided We Stall

‘The Breakup’By Kurt AndersenPenguin Random House, 576 pagesWhat will this country look like in twenty years’ time? According to Kurt Andersen, it will be split in two. On one side, a breakaway “Free American Republic” (FAR) of 21 states, among them Tennessee and Georgia. On the other, a reshaped America of 39 states, including Puerto Rico, Washington DC, and new states carved out of secessionist territory, such as Palmetto and Bluegrass.At home you can watch an AI movie starring simulated versions of Chadwick Boseman, Heath Ledger, and Marilyn Monroe, “all arguing and making out with one another.” This is the brave new world of Mr. Andersen’s new novel “The Breakup,” a satirical epic of a nation coming apart.I have admired Mr. Andersen since his novel “Turn of the Century” (1999). That book is one reason I moved from Britain to America. It foretold how the early 21st century would feel: “High production-value, fiber-optic, evanescent rococo, imagineered Albert Speer gilded and baking in the desert sun.” Opening Andersen’s 576-page “The Breakup,” I hoped he would do the same for what comes next.The plot follows a “Gen Z–Millennial power-couple”: Natalie, a Cuba-born, moderate liberal writer, and Asher, an uber-woke Jewish science administrator, struggling to save their marriage. It is 2045, in an AI-saturated America still recovering from Civil War II (2036–38), which killed 28,000. With their savvy, queer 17-year-old daughter, they set off to tour colleges in both territories. Will the family — and America — reconcile?It is a satirical panorama, rich in gallows humor. Dickens supplies the epigraph, from “A Tale of Two Cities,” and a running gag about “the Trump twenties,” whose courtiers are “Uriah Heeps and flying monkeys.” Philip K. Dick’s bifurcated America in “The Man in the High Castle” hovers over it all.Mr. Andersen is an erudite history buff and a witty wordsmith. He coins acronyms — PFR (Perfectly Faked Reality), UVC (Uncanny Vegan Cheeseburgers) — and calls Natalie’s anxiety attacks “existential whirlies,” as opposed to the “zen-x” types (Zen plus Xanax), best achieved as a “social media teetotaler.” Those born between 2025 and 2039 are not “Gen Beta” but “Gen Be, for being here now, living in the moment.”As in Alex Garland’s “Civil War,” or Julius Taranto’s “How I Won a Nobel Prize”, near-future fiction is a time machine. Three cheers for future-porn! So: Israel and Iran trade nuclear strikes in 2031; President Andrew Im, grandson of Korean immigrants, expands the Supreme Court to 13 justices; and Elon Musk dies of an overdose on a rocket to Mars.This may be the first significant novel to dramatize what AI does to families and nations, and it is partly reassuring. No Armageddon, à la “The Last of Us”: “True AI” reaches superintelligence in the mid-2030s, yet Asher notes, it “hasn’t made a single move whatsoever to wipe us out.” Mr. Andersen also scotches the AI-doomers’ other great fear, that it will take our jobs. Robots do the work of most waiters, nurses, cops and soldiers — one even faces a sexual harassment suit for peering under a bathroom partition — yet the only “unemployment” in the book stems from the FAR’s post-secession economic collapse.But Kurt Andersen’s real subject is the politics of “Disunion.” The big winners, as in any divorce, are the lawyers. As Brexit showed, stay-or-leave referenda and new statutes generate millions of billable hours. Attorneys get their snouts in the trough when cities such as Nashville vote to stay in the US as “Independent Metro Regions” while Tennessee joins the FAR, or when states like Montana suffer “secessionists’ remorse.”The cast is truly original. Six of them take turns narrating. One is Minnie, a 180-year-old tortoise whose memories are retrieved by brain-scanning — surely the first novel narrated, in part, by an animal’s tech-mediated recollections. Then there is Ava Minkowski Musk Motley, performance artist and “widow of the first trillionaire” — a certain Elon, “whom she married shortly before he overdosed en route to Mars” — whose Zelle once charged selfie-seekers $100 a picture.Equally innovative is Yumi, the AI confidant to both spouses. A decade earlier Natalie and Asher “Kibu-coupled,” granting one digital agent access to all their data; Yumi knows everything about both yet scrupulously refuses to cross-report. Yumi, nonbinary and agender, concedes that the arrangement has become “slightly problematic” now that the couple have separated. Would you give your partner full access to your chatbot?The book’s central problem is its central couple. Asher and Natalie should be star-crossed lovers we root for — a marriage, like the Constitution, striving “to form a more perfect Union.” Yet they reflect none of America’s political divisions. Both are Democrats: pro-choice, pro-Remain, anti-death penalty. Mr. Andersen has missed a trick. Natalie is a Cuban immigrant, a community full of passionate MAGA supporters. Why not make her a committed conservative — a Montague/Capulet, Red/Blue dynamic? Or does he believe any marriage is doomed when one spouse shops at Cracker Barrel and the other at Whole Foods?The leftward tilt runs throughout. Not one significant character is a Republican, let alone a member of the preposterously named militia WOMFAT (Well-Organized Militia Fighting American Tyranny), with its red-and-black flag and taste for bombing LGBTQ welcome centers. The reader never sees the other side or learns why millions of Americans might want to leave the Union.The book often reads less as the “American nightmare” Mr. Andersen intends than as a socialist wet dream. Donald Trump’s death is a cheap shot: the 89-year-old dies “of a massive brainstem stroke while on the famous escalator” in Trump Tower. The first president of the 39-state America is revealed as — ta-dah! — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Marco Rubio and JD Vance go unmentioned, though Travis Kelce becomes governor of New Missouri and New Kansas and Trump’s granddaughter Arabella Kushner a Fox Business anchor.Even-handedness was always a tall order. Mr. Andersen’s last book, “Evil Geniuses” (2020), was a sustained assault on conservatives. But he might have reached beyond the leftist echo chamber and started a more useful argument. That would mean rethinking a South rendered as a land of Dave’s Sugar Fried Everything franchises, where even a doomed militia’s last breakfast is doughnuts “topped with chopped bacon, Oreo pieces and cotton candy drizzle.”For all its inventiveness, the novel left me as cold as a chatbot’s message of condolence. Great fiction takes over your consciousness; you live inside it. Here the family road trip — the book’s engine — does not start until page 337, far too late; by then I had stopped caring whether the marriage, or the country, survived. Mr. Andersen has imagined a future in extraordinary detail. He has not persuaded us to feel anything about the people living in it.

Divided We Stall

Divided We Stall

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