In Goodbye to All That, one of 14 essays collected in Notes From No Man's Land, the American writer Eula Biss looks back on her time in New York and ponders the discrepancy between the Big Apple as she experienced it and the glamorous New York "of the collective imagination". Biss recalls feeling "excruciatingly lonely"; it was not so much "a place to live as much as it was a test or a game". There was, for her, nothing romantic about the squalor and drudgery of the city: "When someone who spends the better part of every day in a cubicle and only occasionally ames it out to sit in a loud, dull bar tells me that she is living in the city for 'the pace, the excitement, the culture, the – you know – stimulation,' I have trouble fully believing her."
This willingness to attend to the reality beneath the veneer is a hallmark of the essays in this volume, which examine contemporary American society with rare lucidity and insight. If the events of the past year have taught us anything, it is that the America we think we know – from movies, television and folk memory – is little more than a mirage, masking myriad complexities and contradictions. This is nowhere more apparent than in the essay Black News, in which Biss reflects on a stint working for the San Diego-based African-American newspaper Voice and Viewpoint. The stories she covered there comprised a bleak snapshot of the black community's fraught relationship with various branches of the US state. In contrast, she says, the news in mainstream organs such as the New York Times "read like someone else's fantasy". The seemingly unbridgeable distance between the two worlds was evidenced in the incredulity of reporters sent to New Orleans to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, who were genuinely shocked at the state of affairs they encountered.
Affluent student thought
Biss found herself on other side of the class divide during a spell as a teacher at the University of Iowa, where a score of blond, affluent students cheerily informed her that racism and sexism no longer exist in the United States, that those battles were fought and won in the 1960s and 1970s. Biss ponders whether such wilful complacency is merely a necessary prerequisite of enjoying a privileged existence, but the fact that these youngsters genuinely believed they were living in a postracial utopia tells us a lot about today’s America. Divided along the fault lines of class and race, the nation’s sense of itself is sustained by a counterfactual narrative of homogeneity and exceptionalism – a point well understood by Donald Trump and his campaign team during their successful election campaign last autumn. The essence of “post-truth” politics is the ability to deny objective reality with a conviction so fervent it forms its own moral centre of gravity.
The essays in this book were written prior to Trump’s election, and have acquired extra resonance in light of it. At a time of profound uncertainty about what it means to be American, Biss’s insights on the history of American migration, both internal (rural-urban, and vice versa) and external, are especially timely. She sees, in the overweight, sunburned figures of white expats in Mexico, an indictment of the American dream: the human traffic, we are reminded, goes both ways. That Biss’s damning verdict on the exploitative effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement brings her broadly into line with the views of the current president is neatly illustrative of the dilemma facing left-leaning or progressive voters on the question of economic policy: Nafta is Trump’s bête noire; the supposed “good guys” in mainstream politics are all for it. Liberalism threw its lot in with globalisation, and in 2016 it paid a heavy price for it.
A poignant chapter on the brief life of the former mining town of Buxton, Iowa – built in 1900, a ghost town by the 1920s – revisits a singular success story in American race relations. An integrated community with markedly little in the way of interracial violence or discrimination, it was a blueprint for what modern America could have been. Almost a century on, the US is still at odds with itself. Biss proposes that, rather than trying to see themselves as raceless, 21st-century Americans should set themselves the more modest goal of trying to “establish some collective understanding that we are all . . . damaged, reduced, and morally undermined by increasingly subtle systems of racial oppression and racial privilege”. Like so much of Biss’s writing, the message here is simultaneously both forceful and measured – no mean feat when there is so much at stake.
