A Review of Gish Jen’s The Resisters (Knopf, 2020)

Posted by: jacobballew

 

Hardcover | $26.95
Published by Knopf
Feb 04, 2020 | 320 Pages | 5-5/8 x 8-1/4 | ISBN 9780525657217

Gish Jen has returned to fiction! There’ve been a couple of nonfictional books that have come out, so I know some of us has been recently waiting for Jen’s next fictional offering, which has appeared in the guise of a sports/science fictional novel: The Resisters (Knopf, 2020). Let’s let Jen’s official site give us the set-up: “The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet: one part artificial intelligence, one part surveillance technology, and oddly human–even funny. The people: Divided. The angel-fair “Netted” have jobs, and literally occupy the high ground. The copper-toned “Surplus” live on swampland if they’re lucky, on water if they’re not. The story: To a Surplus couple–he once a professor, she still a lawyer–is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm. At two, Gwen is hurling her stuffed animals from the crib; by ten, she can hit whatever target she likes. Her teens find her happily playing in an underground baseball league. When AutoAmerica rejoins the Olympics, though–with a special eye on beating ChinRussia–Gwen attracts interest. Soon she finds herself playing ball with the Netted even as her mother challenges the very foundations of this divided society. A moving and important story of an America that seems only too possible, The Resisters is also the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity in circumstances that threaten their every value–even their very existence. Extraordinary and ordinary, charming and electrifying, this is Gish Jen at the height of her powers - and at her most irresistible.”

 

It’s interesting that the description only describes Gwen, as the novel is probably as much about her mother, as it is about Gwen. This novel is one of those few types that are narrated in the first person but not autodiegetic (ugh, narratology term I know). What I mean is the novel is basically narrated in the first person by Gwen’s dad, Grant, but he is more of an observer than a driver of action. Never is this fact more apparent than in the section where Gwen goes to the land of the netted, where she attends Net U, and practices with the U’s baseball team. She’s so talented that she simultaneously negotiates the admittance of her sometimes friend, sometimes enemy Ondi (also Blasian). Ondi’s family and Gwen’s family do have some overlaps, as members of their family have been asked to CrossOver, the term used to describe the few Surplus individuals who might become Netted. In any case, Gwen’s mom didn’t CrossOver, and Gwen’s just as conflicted about the possibility that she can Crossover. Eventually, Gwen gets sick of the internal politics of Net U and the life of the netted, and she returns to the land of the Surplus. The back half of the novel is definitely the strongest: I read this portion at full speed. The novel begins to veer into something that I can best describe as a mash-up of The Stepford Wives and A Wrinkle in Time. The mix of baseball and science fiction was intriguing, and I totally enjoyed it. I can’t really recall another narrative that mixed the two so well. But, perhaps, the most interesting “character” of this particular novel is not any of the human figurations, but the massive, self-learning artificial intelligence entity known as Nettie, who sees all and apparently seems to hear all. Reading up on surveillance capitalism, I see how this novel fits quite well within that paradigm.

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