Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Joanna Scutts on Shawn Gude’s American Socialist, Dwight Garner on Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack, Rhian Sasseen on Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Will and Attention, Lily Meyer on Madeline ffitch’s Avalon, Rise, and Max Callimanopulos on Tom McCarthy’s The Rhyl Poster. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in socialism, from Bernie Sanders’s runs for president to the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and recently the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor.
Each of these figures has had to face the long-standing assumption in American politics that socialists just can’t find traction in the United States. American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs, by former Jacobin editor Shawn Gude, offers an important corrective, illuminating the forces that shaped America’s foremost socialist evangelist, and the exceptional efforts of his opponents to crush him and his movement.
Along the way, the book reveals a deeper truth: that in the United States, the story of socialism is really the story of opposition to socialism. It was a brew that appealed to crowds wherever he spoke. The era of political oratory made stars of the unlikeliest speakers, whose photographs or transcripts can barely convey what felt to audiences like an electrical current.
Eugene Debs would spend the rest of his life spreading the gospel of this new political religion, and critics and followers alike would frequently compare him to Jesus Christ. How far might a nation go that had no kings to depose, no entrenched hierarchies to uproot, a country so young and iconoclastic and resource-rich? It was a disillusion as brutal as the mines and the mills, to see how powerful the pushback would be.
The promise of American socialism is still unfulfilled, but this is a country in which almost anything can be resisted, rethought, and reinvented. Perhaps the story of Eugene Debs, told as meticulously as this, shows us that reinvention will not come from a single leader, no matter how inspiring, but from the collective resistance, and joyful community, of ordinary people.” –Joanna Scutts on Shawn Gude’s American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene Debs (The New Republic) “…the shuckling on display is so good—so literate, funny, cruel and eccentric—that I slothed with this endearing novel immediately and was chagrined to have to climb out. This book is ideally short, yet one wants to live inside it, in the charmed parenthesis it opens inside the daily grind.
We should have been talking about Barbara Trapido all along. I have a special fondness for novels about young people who grow up in narrow cultural circumstances, with few books in the house or paintings on the walls, who sense there is another way of living and find it by being befriended, or nearly adopted, by unconventional and urbane others. It’s my own story, in a way, and it’s why One of Ours is my favorite Willa Cather novel, instead of My Ántonia.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
