AMERIKALAND

Goodman’s novel presents a vision of a grim American future in which two professional athletes confront escalating waves of discrimination.

The novel’s panoramic opening evokes that of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) with its sweeping survey of the assembled audience for World Day, an international day of peace featuring an athletic competition held in New York City that’s reminiscent of the Olympics. Among the participating athletes are Sabine Hellewege, a native German and seasoned tennis star, and Sandy Katzmann, a Jewish American hometown hero and the shortstop for the local Brooklyn baseball team. Both are recovering from recent tragic events; Sabine was shot midmatch a few months ago by a mysterious assailant in Budapest, Hungary, and Sandy recently came home to find a dead Jewish boy he didn’t know on his doorstep, “battered and bloodied” and with the Yiddish word for traitor etched across his back in charcoal. Both are hoping for a return to normalcy on World Day, but it’s not to be; they and the assembled fans are instead met with sudden “light bombs,” which crumble the stadiums and kill over 120,000 people. Goodman effectively describes the scene with a choral we: “The concrete and earth beneath us give way. We are reduced. And when there is nothing left of our bodies, we become the air.” Later referred to as “the Event,” the catastrophic attack further alters the trajectories of Sabine’s and Sandy’s lives. During these middle passages of recovery, the author deftly reveals the characters’ backstories in controlled reflections on their parents and their own shifting understanding of their places in the world. After grounding readers this way, Goodman picks up the pace considerably in the novel’s second half. Once the characters reunite in Berlin and Sabine is kidnapped, the twists come quickly in tense scenes that escalate earlier threats of violence. In his intertwining of personal tragedies with broader social issues, Goodman presents an unnerving picture of a world that seems not so far away.

A contemplative, richly imagined, and occasionally thrilling exploration of the near future.