Detroit’s new colonials

In the opening sentence of this subtle and finely poised novel, the narrator, Greg Marnier, known as ‘Marny’, admits that he ‘was never much good at telling stories’. By the end he is accused of having a ‘confessional streak, but no real desire to explain yourself’, while realising that ‘everything people do, everything they say, is just a clumsy form of self-defence’.

He is a singularly obtuse and convincing character — a thirtysomething lecturer with no sign of tenure. Then a chance encounter with a rich college friend leads him to re-locate to Detroit. This friend, Robert James, is buying derelict and abandoned properties, hoping to create a ‘Groupon model for gentrification’, turning online communities into real communities. The young professionals moving to Detroit see themselves as postmodern pioneers in a place where ‘instead of grass, the gardens grew mattresses, tyres and broken bricks’. Their neighbourhood will be Walden with Wi-Fi. Some of the older residents — predominantly black — resist the influx, referring to them as ‘colonisers’. Eventually, suspicion and resentment become more open conflict, as the rueful tone of the beginning leads the reader to expect.

You Don’t Have to Live Like This is a novel that takes race seriously. The young liberals moving into ‘Jamestown’ are both unconsciously racist and unintentionally racist in their hypersensitivity about race. The title of the book comes from a scene where Obama visits the urban village of regeneration, and is frostily ironic. Benjamin Markovits catches the inflections of the President’s rhetoric precisely, and there is a wince-making passage where Marny claims to his new, black girlfriend that he — as a mixed race French Canadian and American — is more akin to the President than she is, despite him going to Yale and Obama to Harvard.