Anthem by Noah Hawley
I want to get real about the realities of writing and publishing a novel like this. Noah Hawley is a big-name writer in both publishing and TV where he was the showrunner for Legion and the successful FX series Fargo. He was a successful novelist before writing for TV and Film but publishers will bend over backward for him, and with good reason.
I have liked all his seasons of Fargo but I just want to say that I LOVED the second season. That season won me over enough that I am going to be in for whatever this guy writes. I reviewed his novel Before the Fall here as well which I liked. I am bummed that while he was developing a Star Trek movie the pandemic seemed to take the steam out of that. I would LOVE to see his Star Trek even more than Tarantino. This book feels like it was born out of the lockdown. Hawley had shifted mostly to making film and television so it seemed a perfect time to dip back into a novel.
That being said, this novel rages like an angry reaction to the 2020 election and the aftermath. The fact that this novel exists so quickly is odd. A bit of a miracle. There are signs that it was rushed to be out. Not in the quality, I think this is a GREAT novel, but there is a lack of blurbs and the normal marketing that takes a long time to put together. It reminds me in the lead-up to the election a few older punk rockers like Articles of Faith’s Vic Bondi (Dead ending American Virus) and Bob Mould (American Crisis) came out with random angry songs about the moment. They were raw topical musical middle fingers.
Anthem is a bit of a novel in a punk rock song style, it feels like those songs to me. Anger, sarcasm, and righteous hope that things can be better. Anthem is not a feel-good novel, it should make you feel nervous about the future but what I think Hawley has done here is pretty magical. It is a minor miracle that a topical novel gets written, edited, bound in hardcover, and sold while the issue is a smoldering hot topic.
The novel itself has the set-up for an epic end of the world vibe like The Stand and gets into a sarcastic Vonnegut satire mode at times. It makes the final product a very singular work of fiction. Not like Hawley's earlier novels or like anyone else's. There is nothing I can directly compare it to. on top of all that Hawley talks directly to the reader and his children in the opening, interludes, and the epilogue. I will come back to those.
The scope of the story is epic, it includes an unexplained mass suicide movement by 15-year olds. In the first one hundred pages, I was getting the impression that the novel had a set similar to Stephen King’s The Stand, except the writing was less epic and grand and more Vonnegut feeling in sarcasm and fifth wall breaking. On page 127 Hawley confirmed some of my feelings by making Randall Flag and Katniss from the Hunger Games characters in the book. Well sorta, I will come back to that.
Despite the heavy nature of the suicide plague, it is less of a plot point as it is a metaphor. The novel could have been about that weird apocalypse and the message would have been below the surface. No less effective but this novel talks directly to the reader and addresses climate change, political division, the Jan 6th insurrection, gun violence, social media, and generally all the ills we face I think part of the message is to remind the older generation what a shit storm future we are leaving in our wake. The adults are wondering why the young people kill themselves but don't for one minute think about the world they are creating for them to inherit. Is that the message of the novel? One of them I think, but there are lots of messages here.
Some of the messages are very intentionally on the nose, I mean every author is talking to the reader, but rarely is it direct and includes referring to himself as “Your Author.”
“Your author would also like to explain that he didn’t want to put all those guns in his story, but this is a story about America. At last count, there were more than four hundred and twenty million guns in America (population 330,000,000). This makes America a Chekhov play, in which a gun shown in Act One must be fired in Act Two. In other words, if you think the next act of American life is going to unfold without gunfire, you’re not paying attention.”
My favorite of these dialogues is on page 217: “But if the author’s job is also to reflect reality as he perceives it onto the page, then what is meant to do when the world he lives in in loses all sense? Consider this: as he writes 34 percent of his neighbors have gone to war against these tiny pieces of fabric worn across the nose and mouth…”
This novel is about our world, our times. Clearly, the COVID novels are starting to be written and released and this one is totally direct.
“Op-eds were written- is this the end? It was, of course, just a few years earlier that the COVID-19 plague had swept the planet, locking us in our homes, dooming the elderly and the infirm to panicked suffocation, spurring the almost-civil war, the flashpoint of a brewing culture clash, where the word mask became an invocation or an insult.”
I was worried that I was oversensitive to this theme as I had just written an article about the Philip K. Dick novel The Man in the High Castle and the modern Post-Truth world. I worried that I was seeing a similar theme by accident. Hawley however is absolutely dealing with the modern form of post-truth when Phil in 1961 was inspired by the recent (at the time) close call with fascism. Each of the novels speaks to the threat of a world where reality doesn’t exist. Phil explored it with a Nazi victory and the fake novel inside of a novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
Hawley like all of us is living day to day in this very obvious Post-truth world and the novel reflects it. He implies that “It started with cigarettes. Selling a product that you know will kill them.” This is interesting, but where started doesn’t matter. There are funny moments in this book but it is not a feel-good affair, it is a brutal satire of the worse elements of modern and an angry one. Hawley’s feelings as an angry father raising children in this world is like a raw exposed nerve. If the novel had a mission statement to me it was this question…
“What skills must our children master to survive in a world where reality itself is polarized?”
This is a novel about a post-truth world so why not have characters decide that they are Randall Flag and Katniss. Why the hell not? Nothing is real in a world where very little is agreed upon as objective. Hawley finds interesting ways to never say Republican or Democrat, the analogies are not meant to fool anyone. Surfers are republicans, Swimmers are democrats The God-King is clearly Trump. You know who he is talking about but doesn’t that just further the Post-Truth commentary.
Where the reality hits home is the scary creep of awfulness that takes over as the narrative goes on. This is where the cli-fi elements meet the right-wing mix together to paint a bleak future.
“He has no idea that California, Arizona, and New Mexico are burning. No idea that paramilitary groups have moved on thirty-nine statehouses.”
Anthem is a warning novel just as much as Alas Babylon, or John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up and the latter is one of the darkest novels I have ever read. I think many will find this novel to be a dark and sad projection of the future. As a message or a middle finger, I loved it deeply. It is dark, even when it is being sarcastic. Many sad laughs.
As a novel, it has a few warts. The tone is all over the place, it is overly didactic which doesn’t bother me, but it will make it a preaching to the choir affair. The choir needs to be reminded so that also doesn't bother me. Hawley who is a gifted storyteller clearly had way more fucks to give for the message than the story. Interesting characters like Remy and Supreme Court nominee Louise are fleshed out early and their resolutions are kinda thin. There are lots of interesting asides like “The Tyler Durdens have been put in charge of base security.” Or “My point is, look around you have a population of adolescents who in any other decade would be fucking their brains out, but instead, were on Tik Tok.”
The final act is not as clean as the first 100 pages, but that is probably because Hawley was chasing the post-truth insanity. Overall I think it is a neat book. Now consider how we started this review. This book came together at warp speed. So grading on a curve. I would say that this is a great novel, not quite a masterpiece but also important. I think it should be read and discussed.
