by Andrew Hedglin

On the first day I started working at Lemuria in June, my tour of the store concluded in the back of the store where we keep the ARCs (advance reader copies). I spent a few minutes looking at them, and the first one to really grab my eye was You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits. First, it had an eye-catching cityscape cover with big, white words superimposed onto an advancing Detroit skyline. Second, it’s hard to resist the comforting pull of those words, even and especially if they signal that the person hearing them is in a pretty bad place, and I had just left behind an ill-fitting career.

The title comes from a fictional Obama speech in the middle of the novel, but it also applies to the protagonist and narrator of the novel, Greg Marnier (a.k.a. “Marny”), at both the beginning and end of the story. Marny, a Millenial in spirit if not age, quits his middling job in European academia before being approached by a college friend from Yale and politically ambitious hedge-fund millionaire, Robert James, with an intriguing opportunity: to help revitalize—or gentrify—some neighborhoods in Detroit. The project, eventually known as New Jamestown, sounds a bit like something you might hear about on an episode of This American Life and the shady economic dealings behind the scheme are something you would DEFINITELY hear about on Planet Money.

“Let me ask you a question. This is what I don’t understand. Those are some nice houses on Johanna Street, but what are you going to do when you get there?”       

“I don’t know. I’m drifting for a bit right now.”

“Well, what are you good for?” she said.

This strategy works out only slightly better for Marny than it does for Wash.

This exchange occurs when Marny is—poorly, drunkenly—introducing himself at a party to his future love interest Gloria, an art teacher and native Detroiter. Marny helps fix up the house he lives in, writes a community newsletter, and becomes a substitute (then part-time) teacher. But he’s always a little underemployed, especially for somebody who enjoyed the benefit of an Ivy League education.

This preferred method of living is part of why I get why people would be frustrated, or even maddened, by Marny. But, ultimately, I think, he’s a gentle and empathetic, if somewhat self-interested, soul, who really does believe in New Jamestown. He thinks its residents really can build a community. Though he’s interested in exploring the lives of radically different people, because he tries to understand everybody’s point of view, he’s not very good at helping people from different groups communicate. And that’s when things go to hell.

Even if you don’t like Marny (who I think it helps to picture as acting and sounding somewhat like Jesse Eisenberg), there’s still a lot to love about this book. The story is sort of about race, definitely about privilege, partially about economics and class, and above all, it’s about cities and community. In the words of the great Rembert Browne, “ I care about cities, because that’s where people are forced to intermingle. I care about cities, because that’s where the culture is. And I care about my city above all, because it’s mine.” This book is about that hope to create, or desire to defend, that sense of ownership of a city, Detroit.

Sometimes that contact becomes conflict, and sometimes that conflict becomes conflagration. Two racially-charged incidents, one involving two of Marny’s closest friends, bring into sharp focus the tension between predominately white New Jamestown settlers and the predominately black Detroit natives. Since gentrification itself produces deep divisions, it doesn’t take much to turn a spark into a flame.

This might sound like a heavy story, but the breezy, funny-peculiar narration doesn’t read that way at all. The style is readable, un-self-concious and unliterary, even to the point of narrative apology at the very beginning of the book. It reminds me a little bit of books I’ve read by Jonathan Tropper, Richard Russo, Tom Perotta, or Meg Wolitzer (although the intended audience feels like it skews younger, generationally). It comes off as a little bit of a paperback read, but there’s enough depth and length to justify value as a hardback.

I don’t know. I’m still learning about how I don’t, and do, have to live. And living other people’s stories through books has always helped me do that.

by Andrew Hedglin

A Free State by Tom Piazza has a great title. It might not jump out at you on the shelf, but trust me, it’s great. Back when I took classes teaching me the craft of poetry, the thing I enjoyed most, besides playing with the musicality of language, was finding a phrase that meant many things without being too self-conscious about it.

That’s what this title is—and that’s what the book is: highly artful while remaining accessible. Short, but with a lot to see. What does a “free state” mean? Let me count the ways:

1) a free state – a term you might recognize form social studies class. One of the states in the American union that outlawed slavery before the Civil War. In this case: Pennsylvania (specifically Philadelphia), 1855. This is where we find our two protagonists: Henry Sims, a runaway slave from Virginia, and James Douglass, a former farm-boy who literally ran away with the circus and is now managing a blackface minstrel music revue.

2) a free state – the freedom from life’s banality that James Douglass finds in musical performance. Douglass was raised on a hardscrabble Pennsylvania farm in a household that reminds me of a line mentioned in the John D. MacDonald biographies on the back of all the Travis McGee novels: “Imagination was frivolity and frivolity was not on the agenda.” One day when he sneaks into a minstrel show by Joel Walker Sweeney, that’s it for him.

He follows music as far as it will take him from the farm, through the circus, to the theaters of Philadelphia. When he describes this journey to Henry, saying he felt “as if [he] had been freed from a life of oppressive servitude,” Henry can only answer “with a look half amused and half derisive…‘Your eloquence is admirable.”

3) a free state – Henry’s condition, real only in each moment that he exists with it, of being escaped from chattel slavery. Henry is a prodigious, electrifying musical talent that grants him privilege that transcends his race—up to a point—on both the Virginia plantation where he is from and the Philadelphia stage he performs on in defiance of the law.

The impetus for Henry’s flight from the plantation is not physical brutality but emotional betrayal by his master; although there is plenty of evidence of the former where’s he from. Like Douglass, he is also brought to a higher place by music, but with that higher place comes higher risk—of being brought back into enslavement, even death, as the savagely violent slave hunter Tull Burton fanatically pursues him.

Henry’s journey is particularly fascinating and complexly imagined as he struggles to run from the past he hated and yet misses; to play the music of his servitude and not be ashamed. The abolitionists in Philadelphia tell him to put the banjo away: “They said it was a slave instrument, and he had thought, I am nobody’s slave.”

Douglass and Henry meet and agree on a mutually beneficial agreement wherein Douglass provides the opportunity and Henry provides the talent. From there, both men—and the reader—consider the stakes as they navigate questions of love, trust, and moral responsibility. They both have to decide if they find something more valuable than their beloved and hard-won freedoms. The stakes are so high and consequences so real it is easy to forget Douglass and Henry are both no older than their early twenties, and are still growing in their personhood.

The final chapter is particularly stirring, told from the perspective of a recognizable, important historical figure. This anecdote is the antidote to believing that the story, Henry’s story especially, ends with the novel itself. Henry’s final song is haunting, much like the novel itself is, lingering with you long after you receive its final words.