ON WHITE MAN'S LAND

Sonora Jha weaves a potent story about US academia and the realities of race, privilege and politics

- Rimi B. Chatterjee

This book brought home to me a fact I have long suspected to be true, but which became very clear while I was reading it: America terrifies me.

Since the beginning of this year, there have been 130 mass shootings there in 87 days; just a few days ago, there was a big one in Nashville. Life is cheap in America: you can get it for the price of a 9 mm pistol and a box of rounds from Walmart.

But don't get me wrong. This book is titled The Laughter, and for sure the first third of it is hilarious. The wit is like Coetzee on acid; it’s like Nabokov had a sex change. However, the final third is guaranteed to wipe the smile off your face. It reminds you of how, up until World War II, Americans were largely figures of fun in literature, with their brash manners and their wilful ignorance of the world. It was only as the Cold War unfolded and Bretton Woods strangled us with foreign debt that we began to realise the sinister background to their culture. They stole a country and never said sorry.