“We are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” — Kurt Andersen, from The Breakup
It’s 2045 and America has got divorced. That’s the premise of The Breakup, by the historian and novelist Kurt Andersen. “The future is fiction. It hasn’t happened yet,” the historian in Andersen reminds us. But his near-term fictional future, an America of civil war and national divorce, certainly isn’t inconceivable. Nor, in an increasingly divided United States between high-tech coastal elites and a medieval hinterland, does such a scenario appear quite as nightmarish as it once did.
In contrast with the bloodiness, say, of Alex Garland’s Hollywood version of an American civil war, Andersen’s literary breakup is the “scattered violence of a Middle Eastern kind.” Lebanon comes to the United States in the form of loosely confederated militias, assassinations and kidnappings. This war kills 28,000, half of them civilians. It could have been worse. Indeed, it is worse today — when compared to the 44,000 people killed by guns each year.
The novel also tells the story of the breakup of a twenty-three-year marriage between the Tennessean poet Natalie and the San Francisco tech bro Asher. Natalie doesn’t much like Silicon Valley and warns that “we are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” But for Andersen this age isn’t totally dark. Marriages and countries break up, he reminds us, and that is often the beginning rather than the end of the story. Not quite darkness at noon. So get ready for the mid-21st-century break-up of the United States. Such a split might actually be brighter than America’s current dark marriage.
