America’s After Party: An Addendum

“This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin.”

All right, it’s been a while since I last posted anything here, so I thought I’d ease into it by doing a brief book review and recommendation. Also, this is sort of a follow-up review of two books I wrote about in late 2021 (if you haven’t already, you should go back and read that post – and follow some of the links there as well).

American War by Omar El Akkad, a journalist and writer, has a very similar theme to those two books; I would have also covered it back then, but I only learned of its existence less than a year ago. It was, however, published before both Afterwar and After the Revolution.

The setting is the late 21^st century, from 2075 to 2095, during a war in which the South (specifically South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas) once again secedes from the rest of the US in the aftermath of a law that entirely bans the use of all fossil fuels – because at this point the climate crisis is in full swing, so that, e.g., all of Florida is under water and most coastal areas are also flooded (the US capital has even been moved to Columbus, OH).

Anyway, in the immediate aftermath of the secession, most of Texas immediately gets seized by a newly powerful Mexico, while South Carolina falls victim to a bio-weapon unleashed by the US military, a type of highly infectious virus that makes all of the adults lethargic to the point of immobility, so that most of the state is cordoned off while the people there waste away.

The story is narrated more or less as a memoir by an elderly man living in the mid-21^st century, and he tells the story of the principal character, his aunt, a girl/woman named Sara T. Chestnut (who insists on being called ‘Sarat’). We follow her from age 6 – when she and her family flee from fighting on the Mississippi River in upper Louisiana to a refugee camp on the Mississippi-Tennessee border – to her mid-20s. In that time, she becomes an operative and sniper for the Southern resistance while still a teen and then gets captured, imprisoned in a Guantanamo-type facility and tortured for 7 seven years and then released near the war’s end, a physically misshapen and broken husk of a human. When she’s given a chance for revenge, it has devastating consequences.

Like those other two books, I could make a few minor criticisms, but overall this is an extremely well-written story with some disturbingly brilliant passages. Like this scene, when Sarat is still a child and is being teased and bullied by a slightly older boy in the refugee camp with a malicious grin:

Even then, at such a young age, she understood that smile for what it was: a mask atop fear, a balm for the crippling insecurity of childhoods deeply damaged. They were fragile boys who wore it, and their fragility demanded menace

And then there’s also this point, made by a US government official involved in the peace negotiations with the South, who sees the folly of allowing the latter to dictate the language of the treaty and other official documents (so that terms like, e.g., ‘defeat’ or ‘surrender’ are not used):

You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories

Basically, he sees the danger of history repeating itself. Pretty sobering stuff…

(* As with the previous post, there’s another bit of trivia I found interesting: currently El Akkad lives in the vicinity of Portland, OR, like the authors of those two other books. It’s almost like the city is conducive to dark musings about the fractious future of the United States.)