This August, Random House are due to publish the new novel from Kurt Andersen: The Breakup. It’s been quite a while since Andersen’s previous novel, True Believers (2013), but readers may also be familiar with his non-fiction — which includes the excellent Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses. In addition to his excellent non-fiction, the author on occasion turns to fiction to explore contemporary life and issues — he did this in the aforementioned True Believers, and also in Turn of the Century (2000). This latest book is about a marriage that is cracking apart during a near-future United States that is undergoing dramatic changes following a second civil war and its own break-up.
Here’s the synopsis:
Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they view their fellow Americans and navigate AI-suffused life in 2045. After twenty-three years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States).Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling — confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.
When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their seventeen-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all while dealing with the flux — and resilience — within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?
Razor-sharp, ambitious, ranging from tragic to comic and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.
I’m really looking forward to this. (And have also been reminded that I need to catch up on Andersen’s other novels…)
Kurt Andersen’s The Breakup is due to be published by Random House in North America, on August 18th.
Civilian Reader 