Three months before the Columbine massacre, the massacre at a Colorado high school that 25 years ago forever changed the perception of shootings in the United States, AM Homes He anticipated the tragedy in ‘Music for Burning Hearts’. With her latest novel, her first in a decade, the writer has once again become, despite herself, the oracle of worst nightmares Americans proving that the best fiction is capable of predicting reality.
‘The Revelation’ (Anagrama) begins the night that Barack Obama won the elections in 2008 and tells how the disappointment among the Republican ranks mutates into a call to action to “recover the country”: a coup d’état led by a tacky and millionaire braggart with a house in Palm Springs, dubious businesses and a vase woman who drowns her sorrows in vodka. The similarities with reality (Trump’s victory, the assault on the Capitol) are, again, chilling. “People ask me: what are you going to write next? The truth is that I don’t want to because I’m too scared right now”, confesses the author at the CCCB, where she visited the ‘Suburbia’ exhibition.
How did the idea for the novel come about?
The American political establishment has lost touch with the people. Elections have become a process in which the money involved matters more than what the people need. When Obama won there was a real division. Many celebrated it as a more inclusive future, but his election sparked a latent racism and sexism that continue to flourish expansively, as we have seen in the decline of women’s rights. And we all see how social networks have become a weapon of propaganda and lies. When I told my editors ten years ago that I wanted to write a book about it, they told me it was Science fiction. I answered them: I don’t think it is.
It is not the first time that you get ahead of reality, what did you feel when Donald Trump won the elections?
It was disturbing. I hadn’t quite finished the novel and I didn’t want to write in reaction to it, so I pushed the plot and characters to a more surreal place because reality was becoming very strange By itself. Now I’m scared. People ask me: what are you going to write next? The truth is that I don’t want to because I’m too scared right now. But of course I’ll end up doing it, it’s what I do.
How did you experience the assault on the Capitol?
Luckily the novel was already finished. I wish it had been published sooner, but it would probably have been better if it came out later, because it would have put me in the center of the hurricane again. The events of January 6 were terrifying. If they had found Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence they would have killed them.
You know Washington DC well, too.
Yes, I grew up there and when I was young I used to help organize marches. She was often responsible for security. We met with the Washington police, the Capitol police, sometimes with the Secret Service. I remember a march against nuclear energy, they asked me for a list of ten people with the right to use the Capitol bathrooms. I included Jerry Brown, then the governor of California, to Jane Fonda and me, ha ha. The Capitol Police are chubby people who have been helping senators navigate the hallways for 30 years. They are very friendly, but they are not used to people trying to kill them.
Do you know millionaires like those in the novel?
My parents were socialist-minded artists, we lived in a designer glass house. In the neighborhood where I grew up there were rich people, yes, and later I have met millionaires. What interested me most about the character was writing about someone so boastful, who he is an idiot but he has a very good opinion of himself. What happens when someone like that realizes that they also have flaws?
What would you say is the state of health of the American dream? Optimal, broken, in a coma?
The American dream arises from a kind of end of the world, after World War II. As time passed from being a fantasy to being considered a right. There is definitely a feeling among Trump supporters that he has failed them and that they need to recover by making ‘America great again.’ Many people continue to come in the hope of finding a better life. But I see my students in New York and I think that They are not prepared to have a life.
In what sense?
They are good students, from the Ivy League, but we don’t even know what kind of jobs they will have in 5 or 10 years and that is something that has never happened. Some, at 21 years old, explain to me that they want to be consultants or work in a bank. But in terms of having a path or a way of seeing the world, wanting to be lawyers, doctors, farmers, whatever, they don’t have a vision. Young people are growing up in the midst of a terrible mental health crisis. The combination of the pandemic and Trump generated a lot anxiety and uncertaintyit was terrifying for them.
Do you think Trump will win again?
It surprises and bothers me when people whose opinions I respect say this to me. How is it possible? Does nothing matter anymore? The reason Trump is so dangerous is not because I don’t like him or agree with him. It’s because he only cares about himself. He doesn’t care about the country, the society or the world. Four more years of Trump will put us as a country and the entire world in danger. He spoke of physical, economic and real danger. I don’t know how we will survive if he wins and what world will be left after.
Every generation thinks they are living in the scariest time, right?
Yes, but this is without a doubt the scariest moment of my life and I remember the Vietnam War, when my parents said: ‘If Nixon wins, we’ll go to Canada.’ Which reminds me that I should start looking for a house now. Trump is exponentially scarier than Nixon. He makes Dick and Liz Cheney seem like an icon of morality and resilience.
The novel is full of Republican cameos, from John McCain to a pizpireta Condolezza Rice or a George Bush in search of the M&M’s from the White House, how do you see the party?
Trump’s victory eroded Republicans, many abandoned politics. If he wins again, the party that appears in the novel will cease to exist. It’s fading away, literally. There is no longer even a need for a vision of the country, politics has become a personal show. You don’t even need to know a little history, you can make it up.
The word feminism does not appear in the novel, but the protagonist’s wife and daughter are the ones who rebel against him and the system.
With my teacher and friend Grace Paley We used to talk about how traditionally female authors had written about domestic life and writers like Don DeLillo, Tom Wolfe or Philip Roth They had dedicated themselves to great sociopolitical novels. I wanted to combine the two things in the same book. Women were sold that we could be anything, and look at what happened to Hillary Clinton.
In the novel he talks about the “eternal men”, the era of powerful white men and how their reign seems to be cracking, do you believe it?
That generation is fading. But they will retain the money, power and influence for a long time, although lately they are told, visibly and only on the surface, that they are no longer in charge. I see it in my classes, how white men feel like they no longer have a voice. It’s interesting to see how they fight against that. But They still control things. We are at the beginning of a long evolution that is simultaneously giving rise to hatred.
You were also adopted, as happens to one of the characters in the novel.
Yes, and I was also adopted into a family where a child died. I told in a book how my biological mother found me, something I obviously didn’t expect and which was very wild for me. My biological father was like the protagonist of ‘The Revelation’, he saw himself as a great guy, he had that kind of arrogance, of believe yourself the owner of the world. I remember one day he said to me, ‘We used to own a lot of Washington,’ and I didn’t know what he meant.
Discovered it?
Yeah! I investigated and apparently my ancestors came to the United States in 1564, landed in Maryland and owned the land where the Capitol was later built. In the novel, the protagonist has a fascination with George Washington and it turns out that one of my biological relatives was married to George Washington’s grandfather. How is it possible? It’s so strange. It’s funny how your body can know things that you don’t know. We are not aware of things we know, but we carry them with us.
