“Billionaire hedge fund managers are famous for having the little guy’s interests at heart, right?” Jonathan Dee has an uncanny knack for capturing the zeitgeist. A Thousand Pardons, his 2013 fictional study of America’s obsession with public confessions, was published a few months after Lance Armstrong’s famous doping admission on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The Privileges, shortlisted for a Pulitzer two years earlier, investigated the morality of insider traders at a time when Wall Street’s reputation was on its knees.
Dee’s new novel, about a billionaire with no political experience who becomes the equivalent of the mayor of a small New England town, is equally timely. Is the great American experiment still working and how do individuals feel about it?
Philip Hadi is a wealthy New Yorker. Because of security concerns in the aftermath of 9/11 he moves his family out of the city to their summer house in Howland, a town in the Berkshires. The townspeople find him aloof, but not unlikeable. When he offers to take up the role of “first selectman” and reduce taxes by paying for Howland’s public services, a delighted electorate overlooks his inexperience (and possibly malign motivations) and swiftly votes him in.
Hadi remains a distant figure, but Dee offers us third-person perspectives from almost every other character: Mark Firth, the maddeningly naive house renovator turned landlord, his dissatisfied wife, Karen, his unmarried sister Candace and his libertarian blogger brother Gerry. We peek into the minds of long-standing politicians, a lazy local journalist and even the Firths’ teenage daughter.
The perspectives weave in and out of each other, sometimes within the same paragraph. We get a strong sense of what makes the town tick. This is post-9/11 America, and the battle lines between security and liberty are drawn. Resentment of taxes is growing, as is an appetite for financial risk. Dee suggests these are deeply embedded in the American spirit and that these psychic divisions are the fault lines to which today’s political earthquakes can be traced.
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The novel’s main weakness is that the characters function better as symbols than as people. Although it is slick, observant and often amusing, The Locals feels less like a novel and more like a smart essay on American identity and the consequences of rash political experimentation.
The Locals by Jonathan Dee, Corsair, 384pp, £14.99