Novel explores tensions in Detroit

Post-millennial Detroit, embodying as it does so many aspects of rust belt America’s economic ruin and its uphill struggle for revival, has inspired ambitious non-fiction works, notably 2013’s Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli and Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff. Both turned a bright light on the city at bankrupt rock-bottom as well as its tentative efforts at retaining control of its destiny.

Now there’s a novel, Benjamin Markovits’ You Don’t Have To Live Like This, which covers the same physical and thematic territory. Though the book’s events are set in 2011, the race and class conflicts chronicled here feel as up-to-the-minute as a cable network’s “Breaking News” bulletin, though far more thoughtful and better examined than the latter.

The novel’s protagonist, Greg “Marny” Marnier, is a onetime Yalie who’s drifted home to Baton Rouge after an Oxford doctorate leads to little more than a series of adjunct teaching gigs. Life turned out far better for Marny’s undergraduate classmate Robert James, a charming, charismatic hedge-fund billionaire who suggests to Marny that he join what Robert terms “a kind of Groupon model for gentrification,” in which a 600-acre section of dismal, depressed and mostly abandoned Detroit real-estate would be re-settled and, over time, presumably restored to life.

Lacking a better immediate life-option than “going out of my mind in Baton Rouge,” Marny signs on for what some are labeling “New Jamestown” -- and whose properties are advertised on a website titled, “Starting-From-Scratch-in-America.” Robert’s inspirational hype pulls in a motley, mostly eager assortment of  artists, bohemians, do-gooders and activists from both ends of the ideological spectrum. The neighborhood is still marginal enough for Marny to secure a gun for protection. But the project’s go-for-it buzz attracts attention outside the city from such celebrities as Sean Penn, ex-Monkee Micky Dolenz (no, really) and the president of the United States who, in a droll, boisterous cameo appearance, organizes a three-on-three basketball game in which Marny gets guarded by Obama.

Yet life here is not all glamour and kumbaya. As one white Detroiter warns Marny in reference to him and his fellow settlers: “Detroit is a black city. They don’t want you living there.” Marny recognizes the tension between longtime African-American residents and what they see as an invading army.

Still, he tries to work around and through the polarities by forming a wary friendship with a mercurial black artist and single dad named Nolan and becoming infatuated with a delicate, but intense black schoolteacher named Gloria. Perhaps inevitably, the New Jamestown’s expansive energy is worn down by not-so-new racial and economic barriers. At one point, a car driven by a white Internet entrepreneur injures a black teenaged bicyclist under suspicious circumstances. Later, Nolan is injured in a street fight with a white friend of Marny's and then Nolan is arrested and Marny must testify at his trial. Then it really gets ugly.

So few fiction writers deal directly with street-level economic and cultural conflict in the present day that you’re grateful that You Don’t Have to Live Like This exists at all; so grateful that you wish it were more focused on its teeming narrative elements.

The overall tone of Markovits’ book is inquisitive and reportorial, willing to take as much measure of its diverse characters as it’s able. Yet those aforementioned non-fiction books about contemporary Detroit have a passion, drive and committed energy that this novel lacks.

You Don't Have To Live Like This

By Benjamin Markovits

HarperCollins, 392 pp.

2 1/2 stars out of four