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“Summons up a small American town at precisely the right moment in our history . . . a bold, vital, and view-expanding novel.”—George Saunders A rural working-class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this inspired novel for our times—fiction in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan. A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK Mark Firth is a contractor and home restorer in Howland, Massachusetts, who feels opportunity passing his family by. After being swindled by a financial advisor, what future can Mark promise his wife, Karen, and their young daughter, Haley? He finds himself envying the wealthy weekenders in his community whose houses sit empty all winter. Philip Hadi used to be one of these people. But in the nervous days after 9/11 he flees New York and hires Mark to turn his Howland home into a year-round “secure location” from which he can manage billions of dollars of other people’s money. The collision of these two men’s very different worlds—rural vs. urban, middle class vs. wealthy—is the engine of Jonathan Dee’s powerful new novel. Inspired by Hadi, Mark looks around for a surefire investment: the mid-decade housing boom. Over Karen’s objections, and teaming up with his troubled brother, Gerry, Mark starts buying up local property with cheap debt. Then the town’s first selectman dies suddenly, and Hadi volunteers for office. He soon begins subtly transforming Howland in his image—with unexpected results for Mark and his extended family. Here are the dramas of twenty-first-century America—rising inequality, working class decline, a new authoritarianism—played out in the classic setting of some of our greatest novels: the small town. The Locals is that rare work of fiction capable of capturing a fraught American moment in real time. Praise for The Locals “After 9/11, New York hedge fund billionaire Philip Hadi retreats to his summer home in the Berkshires. In thrall to his new town, he runs for office to keep it sleepy, sweet and free from tax hikes. Is he benevolent, arrogant or both? No one gets off the moral hook in this propulsive, brilliantly observed study.”—People (Book of the Week)
“Thoughtful . . . [Jonathan Dee’s] prescient sensitivity has never been more unnerving. . . . Amid the heat of today’s vicious political climate, The Locals is a smoke alarm. Listen up.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Summons up a small American town at precisely the right moment in our history . . . a bold, vital, and view-expanding novel.”—George Saunders A rural working-class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this inspired novel for our times—fiction in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan. A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK Mark Firth is a contractor and home restorer in Howland, Massachusetts, who feels opportunity passing his family by. After being swindled by a financial advisor, what future can Mark promise his wife, Karen, and their young daughter, Haley? He finds himself envying the wealthy weekenders in his community whose houses sit empty all winter. Philip Hadi used to be one of these people. But in the nervous days after 9/11 he flees New York and hires Mark to turn his Howland home into a year-round “secure location” from which he can manage billions of dollars of other people’s money. The collision of these two men’s very different worlds—rural vs. urban, middle class vs. wealthy—is the engine of Jonathan Dee’s powerful new novel. Inspired by Hadi, Mark looks around for a surefire investment: the mid-decade housing boom. Over Karen’s objections, and teaming up with his troubled brother, Gerry, Mark starts buying up local property with cheap debt. Then the town’s first selectman dies suddenly, and Hadi volunteers for office. He soon begins subtly transforming Howland in his image—with unexpected results for Mark and his extended family. Here are the dramas of twenty-first-century America—rising inequality, working class decline, a new authoritarianism—played out in the classic setting of some of our greatest novels: the small town. The Locals is that rare work of fiction capable of capturing a fraught American moment in real time. Praise for The Locals “After 9/11, New York hedge fund billionaire Philip Hadi retreats to his summer home in the Berkshires. In thrall to his new town, he runs for office to keep it sleepy, sweet and free from tax hikes. Is he benevolent, arrogant or both? No one gets off the moral hook in this propulsive, brilliantly observed study.”—People (Book of the Week)
“Thoughtful . . . [Jonathan Dee’s] prescient sensitivity has never been more unnerving. . . . Amid the heat of today’s vicious political climate, The Locals is a smoke alarm. Listen up.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
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They were saying that all appointments were canceled, indefinitely, that it was the end of everything, but why would they assume that? The subway was running again, for example, parts of it. So people must have been going places, meeting other people. So there were still meetings. So maybe my meeting was still on. I found the lawyer’s card and tried to call his office, but cell service was fucked, still, after like a day. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even ask Yuri for advice, because the phones. What if this meeting was still happening and I wasn’t there? What if everybody showed but me? The lawyer had stressed over and over how important it was that I not miss it. Nobody’d told me it was canceled, technically, according to the letter of the law or whatever. So I put on my shoes. It didn’t start for a few hours yet, but I had nothing to do, and there was fuck-all on TV that day, that’s for sure.
Broadway was frozen, like a screenshot. Nobody on the street. It was cool at first, actually, having it all to yourself like that, like one of those end-of-the-world movies. But then I saw an empty bus with its doors open just sitting in the middle of an intersection, and I started to feel a little creeped out, so I cut west into the park. Saw people there, at least, a few people out with their dogs, just standing there like drugged lunatics while the dogs chased each other around the grass. Then further on I could hear voices, loud voices. There’s this playground in that part of Riverside, at the bottom of a steep hill, all fenced in. And that’s where everybody was, it looked like the whole West Side in this little enclosed playground. It was packed, people were up against the fences, it was like a detention center for kids or something. Parents were in there too, on the fringes, talking to each other, while the kids just ran around screaming like usual. Well, not quite like usual: it was a Wednesday at eleven in the morning, but nobody had school. That’s probably why they were having so much fun. Technically I am still not supposed to be in playgrounds, I think, but it was so packed I figured who’d even notice, and I squeezed my way in.
I had the day off too. It didn’t make a ton of sense to me, but I wasn’t complaining. To make my meeting with the lawyer, I’d been deliberating between taking an unpaid personal day and calling in sick; the paid sick day was obviously the smart way to go, but one thing about me, I am actually a pretty bad liar. Even on the phone, Yuri tells me, my poker face sucks. I took up a position near some parents who were talking with their arms folded and with the look on their faces that everybody on TV had, which I would describe as sort of gray. “Someone in my building,” this one dad was saying, “used to go out with someone who was a broker at Marsh and McClennan.”
It was so loud in there, like mayhem. The kids were going nuts. I think they were really into having all the adults lined up, watching them.
“I was in the kitchen,” this other mom says. She was super hot, actually, with a ponytail through the hole in the back of her baseball cap, and tights like for running, and this really toned milfy thing going on. Black hair. “Josh was home sick from school. He’s watching Sesame Street, and I’m in the kitchen, and they break into Sesame Street with a live news feed, for God’s sake. He starts yelling.”
“Jesus,” I said, just to get her to look at me.
“Right?” Her ponytail swung away from me in the...
About the Author-
Jonathan Dee is the author of six previous novels, most recently A Thousand Pardons. His novel The Privileges was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2011 Prix Fitzgerald and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. A former contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a senior editor of The Paris Review, anda National Magazine Award–nominated literary critic for Harper’s, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in Syracuse, New York.
Reviews-
Starred review from June 19, 2017 Small-town America in the aftermath of 9/11 is the setting for Dee’s engrossing new novel. His blue-collar characters, each of them pursuing the American Dream, are vividly developed, and his insights into how they think about the government (ineffective and corrupt) and their rights as citizens (ignored, trampled) are timely. Mark Firth’s family has lived in or near the fictional town of Howland in the Massachusetts Berkshires for generations. A hard worker in the construction trade, a devoted husband and father and a man of strong moral principles, he wants to parlay his earnings into stock market investments. As Mark’s wife, Karen, perceives, however, Mark is gullible and guileless, and he is devastated when he loses his savings to a con man. When the next opportunity to get rich seems possible, Mark reluctantly enlists his brother, Gerry, a feckless real estate salesman, as his partner. Gerry, meanwhile, has been writing a blog that criticizes the town’s new first selectman, a rich ex-Wall Street hedge fund manager who, postelection, is rapidly exerting his power as an authoritarian politician. A dozen or so more characters round out this picture of a community on the economic skids, whose citizens seethe with a sense of futility and resentment as old values and traditions fade. “I feel like the world is trying to get rid of me.... I feel threatened,” one character says. Alcohol in excess and secret sexual trysts help ease the pain, but jobs are scarce and families drift apart. Dee, who wrote about a wealthy segment of society in The Privileges, handles the plot with admirable skill, finding empathy for his bewildered characters. He creates tension as a reckoning day arrives, and strikes the perfect ending note.
June 1, 2017 The residents of a small town in the Berkshires have their world overturned by a billionaire in their midst.This is a novel with political motives, so much so that it recalls The Fountainhead, except Dee (A Thousand Pardons, 2013, etc.) is a better writer than Ayn Rand by several orders of magnitude, and his point seems to be virtually the opposite of hers. The drama begins on Sept. 11, 2001, when Mark Firth, visiting New York from Howland, Massachusetts, unhappily learns that his meeting with a lawyer has been cancelled. This attorney is representing the plaintiffs in a class-action suit against a con-artist financial adviser who stole their money--in Firth's case, his entire savings. He's not the only Howland resident who will be struggling in the coming months. Though relief over his safe return smooths things over for a while, Mark's wife is far from happy in either her marriage or her job, working as a teacher's aide at a private school so her daughter can get reduced tuition. His brother, Gerry, is fired from Century 21 for an indiscretion; their sister, Candace, is furious at both of them for not helping out with their decrepit parents, and her day job is not on solid ground either. The town is feeling the pinch as well, but the last thing strapped residents want is another tax hike. When their First Selectman unexpectedly dies, Philip Hadi steps into the breach. The Hadis used to be summer people, but in the wake of 9/11 they moved to the country full time, first installing a set of security cameras. Hadi's solution to Howland's troubles begins with cutting government to the bare essentials; according to him, past tax increases were only necessary to feed the bureaucracy itself. If there's a real need for something they can't afford--why, he'll just pay for it. What happens to the citizens of Howland after that plays both as political allegory and kaleidoscopic character study. An absorbing panorama of small-town life and a study of democracy in miniature, with both the people and their polity facing real and particular contemporary pressures.
COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
March 15, 2017
Most recently the author of A Thousand Pardons, 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist Dee taps into the zeitgeist with a novel about a rural, working-class New England town that elects a New York hedge fund billionaire as its mayor. After 9/11, seeking safety and romanticizing the country life, Philip Hadi moved his family. But culture and class clash are inevitable.
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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