These Truths by Jill Lepore

Nonfiction, 2018

Meanwhile McCarthyism abided: mean-spirited, vulgar, and unhinged. McCarthy’s rise, the lunacy of his conspiracy theory, and the size of his following struck many observers as a symptom of the disease at the very heart of American politics. It left George Kennan with a lasting doubt: “A political system, and a public opinion, it seemed to me, that could be so easily disoriented by this sort of challenge in one epoch would be no less vulnerable to similar ones in another.” What had made so many Americans so vulnerable to such an implausible view of the world?

Jill Lepore is a historian who’s truly gifted at exposing parallels between the past and the present, including acknowledgement of all the echoes in between. She’s also a lively and wildly prolific writer. All this makes the ambition of a car-battery dense book covering pretty much the whole of U.S. history feel like as natural as one of the shining seas on either side of the land mass where she lays her scenes.

Although there are many, many pages in These Truths, Lepore is obligated to race through monumental happenings to fit everything in, which can make reading the book a little like riding a hurricane. Still, her command of details means certain elements stick out, such as her recurring considerations of the way shifting media — from radio to television to the internet — reshaped the nation’s politics, especially as it become treacherously intertwined with the poisonous influence of all manner of hucksterism, whether manipulative pollsters or opportunistic consultants to soulless candidate. Either inadvertently or purposefully, Lepore’s scholarship at least offers the cold comfort of realizing the villains corrupting U.S. institutions today are not exactly behaving in an unprecedented fashion. They have plenty of antecedents that the better soul of the country regularly prevailed over.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Fiction, 1993

There aren’t enough water stations. That’s why water peddlers exist. Also, water stations are dangerous places. People going in have money. People coming out have water, which is as good as money. Beggars and thieves hang around such places—keeping the whores and drug dealers company. Dad warned us about water stations, trying to prepare us in case we ever went out and got caught far enough from home to be tempted to stop for water. His advice: “Don’t do it. Suffer. Get your rear end home.”

Yeah.

I imagine this novel landed a little differently when it was originally published, some thirty years ago when it was a fascinating exercise in thinking through the collapse of society. Right now, square in the time when the date-stamped passages take place, it goes beyond prescient to feel like it’s forecasting the storm rumbling in from just past the horizon. Because the depiction of a dystopian future is deeply sociological rather than flying-car fantastical, Parable of the Sower is a clanging alarm bell of a novel while the real-life U.S. federal government is deliberately, ignorantly, and maliciously stripping away all safeguards for the citizenry.

Putting aside Octavia E. Butler’s uncanny conjuring of a future that feels problematically like our present, the novel is gripping and a heart-rending. Butler is surgically precise with her prose, conveying the actions of a people under constant threat in a desperate culture and rendering the inner life of the main character with acute empathy. Her writing is reminiscent of Elmore Leonard in its economy and impact. Her clarity in seeing the path taken by cascading dominos of a nation’s collapse makes the book tough going. It also makes it vital.