Ken Kalfus

Rounding up a star because it means well but I did not like this. The vagueness seems to be aimed at achieving a universalness but it comes across to me as reductionist and simplistic, capable of only banal insights such as that highly contested issues in a society can appear baffling to complete outsiders from other societies. Its refusal to countenance the idea that one side in a civil conflict could bear more responsibility or be more unjust than the other, instead wholly embracing a bothsidesism, also does not sit well.

If you told me that ‘Ken Kalfus’ was a pen name for Chuck Todd, I would not be that surprised.… (more)

This book is speculative fiction that imagines a future in which the US has been split apart by a civil war based on the political divide. Many Americans are forced to relocate to other countries. Protagonist Ron Patterson is an American refugee. He finds work as an inspecting and repairing mysterious electrical boxes. Ron keeps a low profile but eventually gets prevailed upon by local authorities to provide information about the two groups of Americans, who have carried their divisive politics to the new (unnamed) country. He learns more about horrible war atrocities committed in his hometown. It is structured in two segments. The first provides Ron Patterson’s experience in the US prior to fleeing, and the second shows his life as a refugee in the new country. The two are tied together by an enigmatic woman.

This book is intentionally vague. Ron has a rare condition that inhibits facial recognition (prosopagnosia). The storyline does not specify the causes of the war, the countries involved in accepting refugees, or even whether or not the characters are the same people referenced in earlier scenes. Ron is an extreme version of an unreliable narrator. He confuses the women in his life to a degree that it occasionally provides comic relief.

The author does a great job of portraying Americans as refugees. They live in an area that is designated “Little America.” The host country’s population has trouble distinguishing one American from another. They are treated as a lesser class. It turns the tables, and I found it an extremely effective technique. The prose is atmospheric, bordering on surrealistic. The climax of the book involves Ron’s espionage for local authorities. He must eventually choose among unpleasant alternatives. The author takes America to task for our divisiveness. It is a social commentary approached from an atypical perspective.… (more)

I guess you could describe this book as a novel about the experiences of a refugee/emigrant far from his home country, having to make a new life, a member of the underclass in his new country, subject to deportation at any time, forced to work menial jobs. Perhaps familiar territory. Except that in this case, the refugees are American, forced from country to country, despised and rejected everywhere.

Set in the near future, the American economy has collapsed, and, although not explicitly depicted the country is engaged in a civil war among various factions and militias. Lawlessness and mayhem prevail. Ron Patterson is one such refugee, and as he states, "People around the world shared contempt for how far our country had fallen." As the story progresses some of the factions from America are re-forming into criminal gangs, intimidating other groups of Americans, and Ron is having a hard time staying under the radar.

This is not a realistic dystopian tale, however. It's told in a surreal and meandering way. For example, Ron is constantly coming across women he believes he knew in his past in America. And he has difficulty recognizing faces--when he sees a woman he has met before, he cannot remember her, and when he meets a new woman, he thinks she is someone he already knows. We are never in on which is the truth. I couldn't tell is this was a literary device to emphasize Ron's loss and disorientation, or whether Ron had an actual malady causing these symptoms.

There were many other surrealistic aspects to the book, and it frequently failed to make sense to me. It did not feel like a cohesive future world was being created, as would have been the case with a more conventional dystopian novel. But this is a complaint that relates to my expectations of what I wanted the book to be. I think that this is the book the author wanted to write, even though it wasn't the one I wanted to read. It was, however, well enough written, and original and imaginative enough that I would read another novel by this author.

2 1/2 stars

First line: "Like many people my age, I found myself in a foreign city where I took a low-paying job in a semi-menial field that I hadn't previously contemplated."

Last line: "The driver looked very familiar."… (more)

This book flips the perspective in Exit West, where the immigrants were presumably from an undisclosed Middle Eastern nation living in identified Western nations. In 2 AM in Little America, Americans are the immigrants living in undisclosed nations around the globe. The impression is clear: immigrants anywhere are the underclass. I also relate this to Slaughterhouse Five, as the only other book I've read in a day. A personal lesson: why I like dystopian novels? I look for cultural threads in our world and how they are expressed in the imagined future. Kalfus imagines our ever fractious division is taken into those few countries willing to accept us. Novel themes included personal memories and our relationship with our dog. This latter helps decide which camp we belong in. Ron, our hero, remains apolitical, and conflates memory of girls from high school with those he observes and meets.… (more)