The Global American Footprint in Fiction

While American novelists expand their post-modernist styles, stretch and bend pop culture irony, embed high art and music into their language, and deal with the culture wars, the rest of the world’s novelists, including Americans from the various war theatres, are writing about ducking for cover from the heavy American footprint everywhere.

The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, is everything a novel should be. It’s primal theme is what life was like in Colombia while America conducted its War on Drugs. It is narrated by an innocent professor/lawyer who meets a guy recently released from prison, a guy who flew a small plane to run pot and cocaine in the 1960s and 1970s. His American wife, who has not seen him in decades, is coming to see him but the commercial plane she is on crashes and everyone dies. Walking home, the professor and his friend are gunned down in the streets of Bogota in the 1990s. The professor survives to tell this story. The back story is all about how his dead friend’s American wife was a young idealist with the Peace Corps and got in over her head with this pilot guy. The professor encounters their daughter much later. Both share hearing the black box tape of when the commercial flight went down. It’s a depressing story, but it is riveting. I don’t know whether it is the translation or the original writing (likely both) but I tried so hard to slow down my reading of this book ( I do that when the writing is superb) and could not.

This novel is solidly structured and woven together with wonderful recurring devices (e.g., airplanes). Can you imagine listening to the last words on a black box tape of the pilot of a plane crashing with your loved one in tow? Yet this horror brings two random people together. The last thirty pages read like that plane falling from the sky, like Vasquez is tightening the g-force between you and his sentences. The narrator, Antonio Yammara, represents all the innocent bystanders and Colombian civilians of the War on Drugs, a collaboration between the Colombian and American governments. Idealism represented by the Peace Corps volunteers is battered, shattered, and buried, but two human beings deeply affected by the events, one shot up who almost dies and the other who loses her mother way before that plane crashes, find each other, at least for a time.

This is the passage that stands out for me: “And you, Senorita Fritts, do you know when you’re going to die? I can tell you. If you give me some time, a pencil, and paper and a margin of error, I can tell you when it’s most likely that you’ll die, and how. Our societies are obsessed with the past. But you Gringos aren’t interested in the past at all, you look forward, you’re only interested in the future. You’ve understood it better than us, better than the Europeans. The future is what we have to focus on. Well, that’s what I do, Senorita Fritts: I earn my living by keeping my eye on the future, I support my family by telling people what’s going to happen. Today, these people are insurers of course, but one fine day there will be other persons interested in this talent, it’s impossible there won’t be. In the United States they understand this better than anyone. That’s why your people are going forward, Senorita Fritts, and that’s why we’re so far behind.”

Lots of people in the US earn their living telling people what’s going to happen – consultants, bankers, regulators, insurers, medical professionals, clergy, data scientists, economists, academics, and probably others I can’t name off the top.

I have read many novels in recent months and years which are translations or in English about other parts of the world, usually places with a heavy American footprint. These include: The Wandering Falcon (Jamil Ahmad) about Afghanistan, The Apartment (Greg Baxter) about an Iraqi War veteran searching for some peace and quiet away from the American footprint, 2666 (Roberto Bolano) about Juarez and the Mexican – American Border drug wars, Back to Back (Julia Franck) about Post- WWII East Germany, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mohsin Hamid) about Afghanistan, Shantytown (Cesar Aria) set in Argentina, Tyrant Memory (Horacio Castellanos Moya) about El Salvador, A Map of Home (Randa Jarrar) set in Egypt, Kuwait, Palestine, and Texas, and A Hologram for the King (Dave Eggers) about Saudi Arabia.

A seminal theme in all of these novels is the implicit or explicit American footprint, whether CIA, Peace Corps, DEA, Pentagon, American consumer, or tech-American corporations; Cold War, War on Drugs, War on Terror, or Global Economic Warfare. It’s easy to say all of these novels are about places America has fucked up in one way or another at one time or another, but it’s more accurate to say they are about how the rest of the world lives in the shadow of a lone superpower.

Mostly, think of a dinosaur bounding your way while you duck for cover. You’ll get the picture.

But I’ve also read some big American novels recently too – Middle C (William Gass), Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon), May We Be Forgiven (A.M.Homes), The Signature of All Things (Elizabeth Gilbert), and Orfeo (Richard Powers), among others. What our “big novel” authors are concerned about and what the rest of the world’s major novelists are concerned about might suggest that the globalization we’ve all heard about and participated in for the past twenty five years (marked in many minds by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) has really been America, often with good intentions but disastrous unintended consequences, making life difficult for ordinary people everywhere. Meanwhile, back in the mother country, our literary world is lathered up about the ironic intersection of pop culture, high art, moneyed society, low-brow professionals, media sensationalism, and corrections to the historical record for maligned segments of the population.

Yet I just heard on the news an hour ago that forty people were shot in Chicago over the weekend. Several weeks ago, it was reported that U.S. veterans are committing suicide at a rate of more than 20 a day. So we have our survival issues. But they aren’t the literary topics du jour.

I suppose if we’re always focused on tomorrow, it’s hard to pay much attention to who was killed over the weekend, or today, or last week.

Anyway, The Sound of Things Falling. It’s worth your time. More truth is revealed in fiction, and this novel reveals truths about how others are coping with our long global shadow overseas. I think we need more that reveal the truths about the chill that shadow has left here at home too.