Our Missing Hearts (book)

Pengo's 2022 Summer Book Club

“All the King’s Screenwriters, 1946: A drama of how Fascism might even come to this country.”
- Firesign Theatre, "Dear Friends"

First, a quick update on my health; I’m good. It’s difficult to see out of my left eye, which looks like a disgusting bloody mess, but it feels fine, a little sore for the additional use. A friend came over yesterday and we watched Magnolia. Man, does that thing hit different once your parents are dead.

But, okay. So. On June 24, 2022, the day Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, a playwright on Twitter recommended all those who were moved to write about this disastrous historical event concentrate on the future, not the present. Two wit; write about the effects this will have on people in the future, not about what is happening today.

Which is to say, speculate. Speculative fiction.

Recently, my fourteen year-old niece was reading The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1984 novel that surged with attention after the 2016 election and the Hulu television adaptation that followed. Author Margaret Atwood created an America in the not-too-distant future in which conservative politics and a very real calamity in the human birthrate combine to create a nation where women are regarded primarily as chattel for breeding.

If you could imagine such a thing.

The success of her work, and stories like this, is in its believability. It is grounded in a reality based on laws which have passed, behaviors which have been exhibited, things that have happened.

Dystopian fictions like 1984 (1949, or did I just confuse you) are extreme in their depiction of the future and so lean more into the realm of science fiction, with their guesses at future technologies. As if you can imagine a world where there are screens in every room which watch you just as you watch them, or that screaming at one would be limited to two minutes a day.

With It Can’t Happen Here (1935), novelist Sinclair Lewis set the events of an authoritarian America in his present. With Mussolini’s reign firmly established and Hitler on the ascendant, Lewis sought to shake the United States from the naïve assumption that our democratic systems take care of themselves and that we would never willingly elect a tyrant.

Art: Hartley Lin
The New Yorker, July 31, 2022

Philip Roth put a spin on Lewis’s novel with The Plot Against America (2004), a revisionist history in which the charming hero and Christian Nationalist Charles Lindbergh runs for President in 1940 and wins.

Imagining an alternate Roth family based on his own, this tale centers on an American family that suffers under the Antisemitism which, previous expressed in more subtle and one might say normative manner, is unleashed in naked fury by an American populace emboldened by their new leader.

If you could imagine such a thing.

This summer I had the opportunity to read an ARC (advance review copy) of Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng, which will be released in October. As described in advance promotional materials, Ng has created an America which has been “governed by laws written to preserve ‘American culture’ in the wake of years of economic instability and violence.” 

Reading this on the beach in North Carolina the the days immediately following Dobbs v. Jackson, in a season when inflation and gas prices may have more effect at the polls than the daily revelations of just how far our former President went to subvert the 2020 election, her work might also have the more immediate title, It Is Happening Here. Or that it has.

It’s the kind of book I would like to imagine being added to the middle school curriculum of every middle school in the nation, if we weren’t living in a land where the reading lists are currently being culled rather than expanded.

Penguin Random House releases "Our Missing Hearts", a new novel by Celeste Ng, on October 4, 2022.

The Plot Against America (book)

The godfather of all paranoid "what if" totalitarian-fetish fantasies remains Orwell's 1984. That story, set in the future, paints a picture of what life would be like if Communism came to England.

There are those (you know, folkies like Billy Bragg, for example, or hippies like Alan Moore) who would suggest that by the year 1984 totalitarianism had indeed come to Britain, though in this case it was Thatcher's "fascist" regime, and not the dreaded Commies. When one's party is out of power, one is given to hyperbole.

Unlike Orwell's novel, where the government of Big Brother was established some time in the past, It Can't Happen Here happens in the "present" dramatizing what it would be like for a fascist-like dictator to be elected President, leading up to that election, and then that which happens afterwards.

I can't remember which I read first, Sinclair Lewis' play (based on his own novel of the same name) or Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Roth's book owes a great deal to the former novel, following a fictional past where Charles Lindbergh runs for President in 1940 and defeats the two-term FDR. In addition to social programs which oppress Jewish Americans, the suggestion Roth makes is that by having an Anti-Semitic President will embolden a large part of our population to openly express the contempt for Jews which has always simmered unspoken.

What strikes me as interesting is that if, for example, we elected a Jewish President, even today, whether that pot wouldn't boil over, anyway. I mean, no one would call it bigotry, no one is bigoted anymore, but a Jewish American President would have to be a Socialist, wouldn't he or she? I mean, that wouldn't be the America we grew up with, would it? That's not our America.

I digress.

The act of witnessing the destruction of America, of imagining it, of describing jack-booted thugs marching down Main Street, taking our guns, pressing our children into service, throwing bricks through store windows of the opposition, pulling people from their homes in the middle of night - or even during the day ... from It Can't Happen Here to The Plot Against America, it makes for great drama. The thrill you get, like watching a great horror film, imagining your own death, it's almost a human need.

Little surprise these morbid thrills have become such big business.

UPDATE: HBO created a miniseries for "The Plot Against America" in 2020.