Benjamin Markovits: Class War in Rust Belt America

It’s hard to imagine a book more of its time than Benjamin Markovit’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This. The novelist places his finger on the racing pulse of an America pumped up with resentment, chronicling the fictional gentrification of a run-down Detroit neighbourhood led by privileged Yale graduates. The novel, winner of the 2016 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in August, touches on all the staple themes currently troubling the US: race, class, economics. The downtrodden native Detroiters Markovits features are used to being dealt bum cards, but the novel also highlights a middle class now feeling short-changed by the American Dream.

We caught up with Markovits to discuss these themes. The native Texan now living in London, he has the hawkish balding head of an academic on the 6ft 6in frame of the basketball player he was, with the ball player's gait to match. Intense yet friendly, Markovits feels instantly of as many contradictions as his highly nuanced work. He chews over questions and bounces them back before delivering highly pertinent answers – possibly an indicator of why You Don’t Have to Live Like This is one of the most intelligent, uneasy and finely shaded works of recent years.

The Skinny: You confront both class and race issues in You Don't Have to Live Like This. Did you find it impossible to disentangle them?

Benjamin Markovits: I wanted to write about race. As a kid in Texas I went to a Magnet school [public schools with specialised courses] and was bussed into the east side of town. And like in a lot of American cities, this black neighbourhood had been separated from the rest of the city by highway construction. My school was in a very African American neighbourhood and the classes themselves were fairly segregated. And I played on the basketball team, so the one avenue of contact I had with black kids that went to my school was through the basketball team. Which is weird, right? It shouldn’t take something like basketball to form a bridge. Anyway...

It had been a subject that I thought about, and I wanted to write about. I touched on it a little bit in Playing Days, my book about basketball. But this book really just grew out of the idea of buying up cheap real estate in Detroit. Wondering, if my life had turned out differently, if it was something that I and some of my college buddies might have done. And as soon as you have that idea, you realise that you have to talk about class and race. So I put the two together.

Is any single real life incident the origin of your writing the book?

BM: I started reading about houses in Detroit going for 300 dollars at various points, the New York Times had strings of articles on it. People were moving to Detroit. The 18-31 demographic I talk about, that was the one demographic whose population was rising in Detroit. All of this was six years ago, when I was working on the book. And there were people forming utopian plans, urban farms, the things I talk about in the book. The book is made up obviously, but stuff like (the plot) seems to have been going on.

Your novel raises many questions about gentrification. Was it important to show the nuances of the process?

BM: Gentrification is complicated. You need a little bit of it, but how do you keep it stable? The absence of good and bad [in the novel] was obviously deliberate. Everything in the book I’ve put there because it could be seen two ways. And if I ever expressed an opinion that seems clear cut, I would work hard in the subsequent scenes to undermine it so that by the end of the book I was hoping people weren’t quite sure what had happened, whose fault it was, whether it should be deplored or admired.

Much of this effect comes from your awkward and contradictory narrator.

BM: One of the things I’ve been saying about him is that I wanted to have a character, a narrator who’s a little bit off about race. Usually you either have a strong relationship with the narrator and you’re quite comfortable parading their thoughts as your own, or you have a strong separation from your narrator and it's very clear to the audience that the writer is someone different from the narrator, and you can get away with saying almost anything. He was a little in-between. I try to make his voice sound as much like my own as I can, and yet he says things that I wouldn’t. And so I hoped that the uncomfortable part about that for me would communicate itself.

The frontiersman approach these middle classes take to Detroit [a native character calls it occupied territory] is reminiscent of an infamous YouTube clip where, in a street confrontation, an angry white Brooklynite claims to another: “The only reason white people like you are living here is because I settled this fuckin’ neighbourhood for you!”

BM: So, one of the ideas I started out with was that I could write about settlers moving to Detroit and turn it into a kind of general allegory for people settling America, in which you would replace the Native Americans there before the Pilgrims came with the African Americans who were in Detroit before they get kicked out of these neighbourhoods.

My home town Austin has a very different problem from Detroit. It’s become too successful, everyone’s moving there, fewer and fewer people living there grew up there. So the history of the city gets overwritten so often that it doesn’t even matter anymore. Even in Austin you get these differences in political opinions, differences in interests between the people who moved there 5 years ago and the people who moved there 3 years ago and they’re all defending their own turf and concerns.

Is it very much a book about human nature? A character claims this utopian ideal can’t succeed because people generally want to do better than their neighbour.

BM: Yeah. Would you move to Detroit? You and a bunch of pals? I don’t know what the British equivalent would be. A once-great city down on its luck where you and a bunch of friends could move for very little money and live different lives because you wouldn’t be so worried about paying the rent or the mortgage or whatever it is. Would you?

Maybe not after reading your book...

BM: As I was writing the book I asked a lot of my college friends if they would move to Detroit. They were sort of intrigued but not many people were gonna jump.

You now live in London, a city which has recently experienced gentrification protests in which the Cereal Killer café was besieged. Although your story is US-based, has this fed into your work?

BM: I'm sure that the real estate situation in London fed my dreams of neighbourhoods where houses cost $300. It’s very hard for a city to stay in the sweet spot where the gentrifiers and the locals interact happily, find work for each other, look out for each other’s kids on the doorsteps. I don’t know how that happens because as soon as gentrification happens you get more people spending money to live there.

In London you have this weird thing where people who have bought houses, and have to work increasingly hard to pay the mortgage on those houses, continually dream of selling up and moving out. Having made it in the city of their choice, what that really means is that they feel the strange obligation to get out.

Another parallel of course are riots, featuring in the narrative of the book and also on Britain’s streets in recent memory

BM: I wouldn’t have thought, if you’d asked me before the riots had started in Tottenham, that London was a city that would erupt into riots. So there are obviously these tensions and discontents constantly in work. It made me realise how fragile the law and order, which you may not even like that much, is. 

In the book I work very hard to make the incident that starts the riot morally ambiguous. Maybe that was the wrong move, because sometimes the things that have been going on in America have not been that morally ambiguous; terrible things have been happening and it hasn’t, from a writers point of view, been very satisfying. The cops have done bad and the people have been innocent and it’s much too simple from a writers point of view.

Much of the anger seems to come from disillusionment. Not only from the working class Detroiters being excluded by gentrification, but the middle classes who feel the American Dream is not fulfilling its part of the bargain.

BM: The truth is it’s quite a middle class book. Even the native Detroiters that Marny comes into contact with are kinda middle class. They’re school teachers and artists. I think part of what made me want to write the book is the sense that, for a lot of the people I knew at college, life had turned out harder than they would have expected, harder than it had for their parents. They were struggling to find jobs, the jobs were not in places they wanted to live, they were far from family, they were trying to raise kids, they didn’t have money to live the lives that seemed acceptable to them. And so the Detroit dream was a way out of frustrated privilege.

You give a cameo appearance in the book to a certain Barack Obama [central character Marny meets Obama at an event and in downtime they take part in some 2-on-2 basketball]. Where did this idea stem from?

BM: You know, I've got an interest in basketball, more than Marny does, it just seemed funny to me to have him [Obama] throw an elbow which knocks Marny out briefly.

In the run up to Obama’s first election, I and some of my siblings went campaigning for him in New Hampshire. We went to this small town called Claremont; hardscrabble, not particularly prosperous as far as I could tell. And we knocked on doors trying to persuade mostly working class and lower middle class white New Hampsherites to vote for Obama.

We were a bunch of Yaleys, privileged people coming up from Boston and New Haven and it just seemed to me impossible that we were going to convince anybody, given the class separation between us [Markovits tells the story again in his Edinburgh Book Festival event, adding that they were instructed by the grassroots organisers to ask something along the lines of "How can I better help you understand this election?"]. And that fed into this book. So Obama’s election was at the heart of it from the beginning.

In some ways your book seems to critique a naïve liberalism. Do you feel in any way that this approach is even more damaging than outright hostility?

BM: What do you think? I guess one of the problems of liberal condescension is not just that it’s condescending, it’s that it lacks intimacy. Tony [a character in the book with race issues] is intimate, he grew up in Detroit, and it’s hard to imagine harmony without intimacy. So, when people’s political ideas make it impossible for them to say what they think and what they feel then that can get in the way of the progress that they want.

Then again you can’t have people saying what they think and what they feel all the time, because they feel lots of stupid things… One of the questions I hope the book leaves at the end is this: Is Marny the problem or the solution? In one sense a lot of what goes wrong is because of Marny, but in another sense he’s the only person connecting these opposing groups.

---

You Don’t Have to Live Like This is out now via Faber & Faber