ANTHEM

Kids In America

- Jonathan Wright

4/5

RELEASED 17 MARCH

448 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook

Author Noah Hawley

Publisher Hodder & Stoughton

It’s a little more than a year since supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol Building. Here was a direct challenge to American democracy. And yet, in its aftermath, a kind of guarded optimism arguably took hold. For moderates, the ascension of Joe Biden to the presidency appeared to hold out the promise of a return to politics conducted along more conventional lines.

Today, with Biden struggling to get legislation through the US Senate and Trump’s hold over the Republicans apparently secure, hope is less easy to find. How are we ever to explain what’s happening in the USA to our children? More widely, how are we to explain a world of “alternative facts”, deep inequalities and inaction over global heating? These are clearly questions that worry Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, whose sixth novel grapples with our age of anxiety by melding elements of the contemporary literary thriller with an urban fantasy quest.

Not that this is immediately apparent when the novel begins. For all that Hawley will build a narrative of interlocking stories so outrageous that, at one point he even interjects, Kurt Vonnegutstyle, to apologise for crafting such a “ridiculous” tale, he lays solid foundations by steadily building the backstories of his main characters, primarily teenagers damaged by the world.