From one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists comes a darkly comic and brutally insightful vision of contemporary America
"I can't buy up the whole of Detroit, but I can put some investors together and buy up sections of it. Nobody wants to move there alone, but you can use the Internet, you can use Facebook—what I’m talking about is a kind of Groupon model for gentrification. The question is, who would go there and what would they do when they got there?
These neighborhoods are in bad shape. It’s basically a war zone—I mean that, in the middle of America. People are burning down houses, and not just for the insurance. My friend Bill Russo took me around. It’s like driving through London after the Blitz. The city has given up on certain blocks; the fire service won’t come out to them anymore. But there are still some beautiful big houses standing empty. You could do whatever you want with them, set up any kind of society. There’s a guy who talks about plowing the land into farms. But you’d need a critical mass of people to make it work. People like you, but would people like you move to Detroit?"
“Yes,” I said."
'Benjamin Markovits is an intriguing, sophisticated and accomplished writer.'
Kirsty Gunn, Observer
Most of the buildings looked in much worse shape. The best way of telling if someone lived in them was by the satellite dishes. Cable companies refused to lay cable because locals spliced into the mainline themselves instead of paying their monthly fee. People also stole cable for its street value. So we looked for dishes.
They weren't hard to find. We saw one as big as a bathtub nailed into the side of a grand old Victorian corner house, with gables and turrets. It was so large it had to be attached by a six-by- six square of plywood. Somehow the dish and turrets went well together—the house a kid would design. There were cars parked on the grass in the front yard. The steps to the porch had caved in, so I climbed up first and gave Beatrice a hand.
"Who lives like this?" I said. The windows were all boarded up.
A young, muscular, well-dressed black man let us in. Two other young men sat behind him on a couch, watching TV. The room looked like a frat house after a party: potato chip bags, pizza boxes, bottles, cartons and napkins lay on the floor. The TV did double duty as a source of light.
No, ma’am, they didn’t want to sell. Yes, they got the lawyers’ letters. There was nothing they didn’t understand or wanted to talk about. If white people want to move in, they can move in. See how they like it.
