The Locals (Dee)

The Locals 
Jonathan Dee, 2017
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812993226


Summary
A rural working-class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this inspired novel for our times—fiction in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan.

Mark Firth is a contractor and home restorer in Howland, Massachusetts, who feels opportunity passing his family by.

After being swindled by a financial advisor, what future can Mark promise his wife, Karen, and their young daughter, Haley? He finds himself envying the wealthy weekenders in his community whose houses sit empty all winter.

Philip Hadi used to be one of these people. But in the nervous days after 9/11 he flees New York and hires Mark to turn his Howland home into a year-round "secure location" from which he can manage billions of dollars of other people’s money.

The collision of these two men’s very different worlds—rural vs. urban, middle class vs. wealthy—is the engine of Jonathan Dee’s powerful new novel.

Inspired by Hadi, Mark looks around for a surefire investment: the mid-decade housing boom. Over Karen’s objections, and teaming up with his troubled brother, Gerry, Mark starts buying up local property with cheap debt.

Then the town’s first selectman dies suddenly, and Hadi volunteers for office. He soon begins subtly transforming Howland in his image—with unexpected results for Mark and his extended family.

Here are the dramas of twenty-first-century America—rising inequality, working class decline, a new authoritarianism—played out in the classic setting of some of our greatest novels: the small town. The Locals is that rare work of fiction capable of capturing a fraught American moment in real time. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 19, 1962
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—Prix Fitzgerald Prize
• Currently—lives in Syracuse, New York


Jonathan Dee, an American novelist and non-fiction writer, was born in New York City. He graduated from Yale University, where he studied fiction writing with John Hersey.

Dee's first job out of college was at The Paris Review, as an Associate Editor and personal assistant to George Plimpton. Early in his tenure with Plimpton, Dee helped pull off the popular April Fool's joke about Sidd Finch, a fictitious baseball pitcher Plimpton wrote about for Sports Illustrated.

Writing
Dee has published several novels, including most recently The Privileges (2010), A Thousand Pardons (2013), and The Locals (2017).

He is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and contributor to Harper's. In 2008 Dee collaborated on the oral biography of Plimpton, "George, Being George." He interviewed Hersey and co-interviewed Grace Paley for The Paris Review's The Art of Fiction series.

Recognition
Dee was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2010 for criticism in Harper's. His 2010 novel, The Privileges, won the 2011 Prix Fitzgerald prize and was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
He was the second winner of the St. Francis College Literary Prize.

He has also been the recipient of two fellowships: The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Currently, Dee serves as a professor in the graduate writing program at Syracuse University, where he lives. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/4/2017.)

Book Reviews
This novel is a big machine, and Dee drives it calmly … perhaps too calmly. He has the intelligence to pull off a novel of this size but lacks, somehow, the killer instinct — the ability to move in for intensities of feeling and  thought and action.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


As the tension builds, protests are planned. Yet for all that the book gestures at a kind of political allegory, it shies away from the capital-S Scene it seems to promise and tapers away into anticlimax.… Still, The Locals is a quietly engrossing narrative that dishes out its food for thought in sly, quotable lines.… [M]y favorite: "Tough times brought out the bad side of people … and this internet was like some giant bathroom wall where you could just scrawl whatever hate you liked."
Lucinda Rosenfeld - New York Times Book Review


[Dee's] sensitivity has never been more unnerving than in his new novel, The Locals … [which] feels attuned to the broader currents of our culture, particularly the renewed tension between competing ideals of community and self-reliance.… With this little town, this idyllic-looking version of America, Dee has constructed a world — harrowing but instructive — where no one feels content.
Ron Charles - Washington Post 


(Starred review.) Engrossing.… His blue-collar characters … are vividly developed, and his insights into how they think about the government (ineffective and corrupt) and their rights as citizens (ignored, trampled) are timely.… [Dee] handles the plot with admirable skill … and strikes the perfect ending note
Publishers Weekly


Dee taps into the zeitgeist with a novel about a rural, working-class New England town that elects a New York hedge fund billionaire as its mayor.… [C]ulture and class clash are inevitable.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Good old social novels are hard to come by these days, great ones harder still. Leave it to [Jonathan] Dee to fill the void with a book that’s not only great but so frighteningly timely that the reader will be forced to wonder how he managed to compose it before the last election cycle
Booklist


(Starred review.) The residents of a small town in the Berkshires have their world overturned by a billionaire in their midst.… [The Locals] plays both as political allegory and kaleidoscopic character study. An absorbing panorama of small-town life and a study of democracy in miniature.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start your discussion for The Locals … then take off on your own:

1. The novel opens in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Talk about the ways that tragedy affected even those who weren't directly involved, people like Phil Hadi.

2. Hadi moves his family to Howland in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts and eventually wins a seat on the town's board of selectmen. How did you feel, initially, about his offer to forgo a salary, donate his recent tax break, and carry some of the town's expenses?

3. Hadi says, "Democracy doesn't really work anymore." What is his reasoning? Do you agree with his observation?

4. Talk about the changes Hadi makes to the town. Do you find any parallels to today, say, in terms of the growing use of surveillance technology?

5. How do the local residents come to view Hadi's wealth? How does it affect their perception of community and/or themselves?

6. Mark Firth is one of the more central characters within the novel. How would you describe him? What about his wife Karen and the couple's marriage? How do you feel about Phil Hadi's influence on Mark, especially when Mark begins to flip houses?

7. In addition to Mark Firth, Jonathan Dee populates his novels with a number of other townspeople. Do you find some more sympathetic than others? Overall, are Dee's characters well drawn—do they come alive, have depth?

8. Mark confesses he feels "like something is lacking in me," and when Phil Hadi attempts to console him, Mark responds that in America, "you're supposed to better yourself …to think big. Right?" Is he right?

9. There is an obvious class division within the pages of this novel. How does Dee portray those divisions, and at the same time offer up satire? Consider, for instance, his take on the tony new restaurant in town.

10. What do the citizens of Howland come to understand by the end of the novel?

m. Inequality has become a major social-politial issue in America. Does this book illuminate or muddy the issue?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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