She grows a bit older and he watches her “throw an apple smack into the mouth of a Halloween scarecrow from clear across a field.” She’s so fluid on the mound that she seems to have a double-jointed back. Grant knows Gwen is special by the time she’s a toddler. They’re wavy Ed Koren characters in a steely “Matrix” universe. They grow their own vegetables, refusing to eat the enervating state-supplied food. His wife, Eleanor, is a lawyer who has previously been jailed for her advocacy work on behalf of Surplus families. This novel’s narrator is Gwen’s father, Grant. We’re in an era of “the New Segregation.” The Netted are “flaxenfair,” as white as polar bears, as blond as rapture children. Her family is a Surplus family, unwanted biology, in part because they are of mixed race. ‘Red Comet’: Heather Clark’s new biography of the poet Sylvia Plath is daring, meticulously researched and unexpectedly riveting.
‘On Juneteenth’: Annette Gordon-Reed explores the racial and social complexities of Texas, her home state, weaving history and memoir.‘How Beautiful We Were’: Imbolo Mbue’s second novel is a tale of a casually sociopathic corporation and the people whose lives it steamrolls.Much of the futuristic language Jen deploys, her portmanteaus, reflects the banality of both corporate uplift (“SpritzGrams,” “WrinkErase”) and state-sponsored evil: “EnforceBots,” “ToeBombs,” “AutoWar.” There’s been an anti-immigration push called “Ship’EmBack.” There is “Total Persuasion Architecture.” I could have used a few more paragraphs about “EgoShrink,” “HomoUpgrade” and “GonadWrap.”Įditors at The Times Book Review selected the best fiction and nonfiction titles of the year. Members of this underclass have not begun to grow gills, like the buff men and women in Kevin Costner’s “Waterworld,” but that may not be far off. The “Surplus,” most of whom live on houseboats in “Flotsam Towns,” have scratchy blankets, thought control and degradation. The “Netted” have jobs, plush amenities and well-zoned houses on dry land. A racial and class divide has cleaved the population. The ice caps have melted, and much of the land is underwater. Gish Jen’s densely imagined if static new novel, “The Resisters,” is set in a future surveillance state known as AutoAmerica. The best thing about writing speculative or dystopian fiction, surely, is updating human language, pushing strange new words into a reader’s mind. The best thing about being God, Iris Murdoch wrote, would be making the heads.
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