Novels set in the future aren’t exclusively the province of science fiction; anxious times tend to generate anxious, cautionary literary dystopias, and when was the last time you can remember not feeling anxious? The 20th century in particular abounded in such visions, some of which — “The Handmaid’s Tale,” or “Brave New World,” published in 1932 and getting spookier every day — have proved more prophetic than others. They’re best understood, though, not as genuine bets on our future, but as dreamlike unleashings of present-day fear over the blind volatility of the moment.
Kurt Andersen, in his new novel “The Breakup,” does something few such books do (Jon Raymond’s excellent 2022 climate-disaster novel, “Denial,” comes to mind); he sets his stage not in some distant century when our own problems are the stuff of history, but a mere 19 years from now, when most of his readers are still likely to be around
In an effort to game out the frightening liminality of American life in 2026, he depicts a 2045 in which — some years after a short, dirty, rather brilliantly imagined second American civil war — the country has fractured into two sloppily distinct but still official entities: the United States of America (now down to 39 states) and the Free American Republic, a largely white and Christian throwback to certain retrograde ideals with which we are all, here in the present, glumly familiar...
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