The Show Must Go On

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What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency never really ended? 

BY DANIEL IMMERWAHR 

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2024 

For many people, the 2016 election was a catastrophe. For Max Boot, it was a betrayal. He’d been a movement conservative: a loud voice for the Iraq War, an editor of The Weekly Standard, and an adviser to the campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. Boot took heart when Republicans initially closed ranks against Donald Trump’s candidacy. Trump is “a madman who must be stopped,” Bobby Jindal said. “The man is utterly amoral,” Ted Cruz agreed. Rubio called him “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the Presidency.” For Rick Perry, he was “a cancer on conservatism.” Then, one by one, they all endorsed him, and he won. 

Trump’s election shook Boot’s world view. Was this what Republicanism was about? Had Boot been deluded the whole time? He wrote a book, “The Corrosion of Conservatism” (2018), about his breakup with the G.O.P. The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, he could now admit, made good points. His advocacy of the war in Iraq Max Boot once felt “incredulous that anyone could possibly compare Reagan to Trump”; he now sees “startling similarities.” had been a “big mistake,” and he felt guilt over “all the lives lost.” Boot was like a confused driver who had arrived at an unintended destination and wondered where he’d missed the off-ramp. When was the right moment to have left the Republican Party? 

For many anti-Trump conservatives, the lodestar remains Ronald Reagan. In his sunny spirit and soothing affect, he was Trump’s opposite. Their slogans differed dramatically: Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” versus Trump’s “Build the wall”; Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” versus Trump’s “American carnage.” Both men survived an assassination attempt, and their instinctive responses were telling. Reagan, though gravely wounded, reassured those around him with genial humor. (To his wife: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” To his surgical team: “I hope you’re all Republicans.”) Trump, in contrast, wriggled free of his bodyguards, raised his fist, and commanded the crowd to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Three days later, he released a sneaker line featuring an image of him doing so, the FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT high-tops, priced at two hundred and ninety-nine dollars. 

Boot grew up idolizing Reagan. “How I loved that man,” he recalled. In 2013, he started writing a book about the fortieth President. His “Reagan: His Life and Legend” (Norton) aims to be the definitive biography, and it succeeds. It’s a thoughtful, absorbing account. It’s also a surprising one. One might expect, given Boot’s trajectory, that this would be a full-throated defense of Reagan, the Last Good Republican. But it is not. 

Although Boot once felt “incredulous that anyone could possibly compare Reagan to Trump,” he now sees “startling similarities.” Reagan’s easygoing manner, Boot acknowledges, concealed hard-to-stomach beliefs. Reagan viewed the New Deal, which he’d once supported, as “fascism.” He raised preposterous fears about the Soviet capture of Hollywood, and fed his fellow-actors’ names to the F.B.I. When Republican legislators largely voted for the landmark civil-rights laws of the nineteensixties, Reagan stood against them. (He’s on tape calling Black people “monkeys.”) He also campaigned against Medicare, insisting that it would lead the government to “invade every area of freedom as we have known in this country.” For unconscionably long into his Presidency, he refused to address a pandemic, AIDS, that was killing tens of thousands of his constituents, and he privately speculated that it might be God’s punishment for homosexuality. Then there is his campaign motto, ominous in hindsight: “Let’s make America great again.” 

Recent events have forced Boot to ask if Reagan was part of the rot that has eaten away at Republicanism. Boot now sees him as complicit in the “hardright turn” the Party took after Dwight TD. Eisenhower which “helped set the G.O.P.—and the country—on the path” to Trump. 

And yet Boot sees a redeeming quality as well: Reagan could relax his ideology. He was an anti-tax crusader who oversaw large tax hikes, an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment who appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, and a diehard anti-Communist who made peace with Moscow. “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” Reagan famously quipped. But he delivered that line while announcing “record amounts” of federal aid. He viewed the world in black-and-white, yet he governed in gray. 

Reagan tolerated a gap between rhetoric and reality because, for him, rhetoric was what mattered. “The greatest leaders in history are remembered more for what they said than for what they did,” he insisted. (The example he offered was Abraham Lincoln, apparently rating the Gettysburg Address a more memorable achievement than the defeat of the Confederacy.) When it came to policy, Reagan was happy to hand things off to “the fellas”—his generic term for his aides, whose names he could not reliably recall. 

This, too, sounds familiar. Like Trump, Reagan held facts lightly but grasped larger emotional truths. When he uttered falsehoods, as he frequently did, it was hard to say that he was lying. “He makes things up and believes them,” one of his children explained. Reagan’s lies, like Trump’s, were largely treated as routine, as if he were a child who couldn’t be expected to know better. Fittingly, both came from the spinheavy world of sales and entertainment. Boot points out that Reagan and Trump are the only Presidents who had television shows. 

“Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?” Boot asks. Usually, that’s a question about each man’s beliefs. Looking at Reagan’s life through Boot’s eyes, though, one wonders about their styles, too. Was there something about Reagan’s way of operating that got us here? 

“Dutch” Reagan, as he was universally called in his youth, was a theatre kid. His parents founded an amateur theatre company in Tampico, Illinois. Dutch remembered being “drawn to the stage” as if it were “a magnet.” He found, in drama, a “wonderful world, possibly more fascinating than any other.” 

Even in his twenties, Dutch had “an inability to distinguish between fact and fancy,” his then fiancée remembered. Yet this was his superpower. He got his break in radio, covering sports. The technology of the day sometimes required sportscasters to announce games from the studio rather than the stadium, describing events they could not see. It was theatre of the mind, and Dutch excelled at it. He would take telegraphed reports of runs and strikes and conjure a world. 

If there was anything unimaginative about Dutch, it was his politics, which were what you’d expect of an artsy son of two artsy parents coming of age during the Depression. Looking back, he saw his younger self as a “near-hopeless hemophilic liberal” who “bled for ‘causes.’ ” He worshipped F.D.R., supported world government, and scorned Republicans who cut taxes for the rich and “snatched away” benefits from workers. A selfdescribed “rabid union man,” he served seven terms as president of his union. 

But that union was the Screen Actors Guild, headquartered in Los Angeles, the world capital of selfreinvention. In his case, the makeover was ordered by Warner Bros. “Take him over to wardrobe,” the casting director Max Arnow barked. “He looks like a Filipino.” Reagan accepted this unflinchingly. He started wearing widecollar shirts to make his neck look longer and combing his hair up in a plasticated style (the “Republican Gumby”) that became his signature. He dropped the nickname Dutch at the studio’s behest and went instead by Ronald, a name he had not hitherto used. He didn’t look back; even his wives called him Ronnie. 

Such was the price of fame. Or, for Reagan, semi-fame. He was “the Errol Flynn of the B’s,” he wrote, and appeared in dozens of low-budget films. He was pencilled in for the Victor Laszlo role in “Casablanca” but didn’t get it. The closest he came to stardom was third billing in an Oscar-nominated film, “Kings Row” (1942), playing someone whose legs are amputated. “Where’s the rest of me?” Reagan’s character screams upon waking from surgery. To prepare, Reagan consulted physicians, psychologists, and disabled people. “Perhaps I never quite did as well again in a single shot,” he wrote. Yet it was a minor scene, and Reagan was never a major star. A poll in 1942, his cinematic peak, ranked him tied for Hollywood’s seventy-fourth most popular actor. 

What saved Reagan from fading into obscurity was what saved Trump: television. In 1954, fifty years before Trump started hosting “The Apprentice,” Reagan started hosting “General Electric Theater,” a dramatic anthology show featuring famous guest stars (Fred Astaire, Jimmy Stewart, James Dean). To showcase General Electric’s products, the program shot documentary segments in the Reagans’ “total electric” house. This was “TV’s first reality series,” the theatre professor Tim Raphael says. It aired on Sunday nights, between “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and it regularly drew more viewers than either. 

Somewhere along this path, Reagan’s politics transformed. He’d arrived in Hollywood a liberal Democrat, but by 1960 he was “about as far right as a public figure could be,” the historian of conservatism Rick Perlstein writes. Reagan saw Communist conspiracies everywhere. Boot traces many of his “shrill and alarmist” talking points to the ultra-right John Birch Society— the QAnon of its day. 

What changed him? The usual story, pushed by his second wife, Nancy, is that Reagan rebelled against the high taxes that Hollywood’s top earners paid. But this is implausible, Perlstein argues; Reagan wasn’t a top earner. A better explanation is that he learned to be a conservative the same way he learned everything else: by playing the part. In an anti-union campaign, General Electric sent Reagan, the firm’s likable face, on a stream of plant visits from 1954 to 1962. Reagan estimated that he spent two of those eight years travelling, and a quarter of a million minutes talking into microphones. He told Hollywood stories to G.E.’s employees and gave political speeches to business groups. The visits were “almost a postgraduate course in political science,” Reagan felt. 

The best orators, the late anthropologist James C. Scott wrote, develop “a kind of perfect pitch” for their audiences’ moods. They try a theme, listen, adjust, and try again. That is how Reagan worked. Rather than delivering typed speeches, he improvised from index cards, which he would edit and reshuffle based on what material landed. Few political figures before the age of social media had anywhere near the unfiltered and prolonged contact with national audiences that Reagan had. And not many were so willing to remake themselves. Speaking largely to conservative groups, Reagan became a conduit for the era’s gathering rightwing energies. 

Reagan performed his road-tested show at the 1964 Republican National Convention. The nominee, Barry Goldwater, was a hard-edged Republican with little patience for Eisenhower’s moderation. Goldwater’s supporters voted down a platform denouncing the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birchers. Reagan’s pro-Goldwater speech, “A Time for Choosing,” told a powerful story, spelled out in shining, mile-high letters, about freedom versus slavery, prosperity versus bureaucracy, and Godfearing Americans versus the “intellectual élite.” The crowd was ecstatic. 

With that speech, Reagan entered politics; he soon won California’s governorship. To help voters see him as a politician, he published a memoir. The obvious title would have been “A Time for Choosing.” But Reagan went with “Where’s the Rest of Me?,” the closest thing he had to a Hollywood catchphrase. There was something cringeinducing about this (“Hey, remember? I’m the ‘Where’s the rest of me?’ guy!”), yet it captured perfectly the vacuity of Reagan’s politics. Here was a world view built less on an ideologue’s bedrock principles than an actor’s need for applause. 

Reagan latched on to something deep in the national psyche—a need for absolution, perhaps, strongly felt in the dour nineteen-seventies. “They tell us we must learn to live with less,” is how he announced his Presidential candidacy in 1979. “I don’t believe that. And I don’t believe you do, either.” 

Reagan’s 1980 campaign was a theatrical triumph of mood-setting. He was elected overwhelmingly. Behind the curtain, though, things were different. The British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, after visiting Reagan in the White House, pointed to her head and said, “There’s nothing there.” The President was “unbelievably passive when not on stage,” his biographer Lou Cannon wrote. His aides described telling him where to stand, what to say, and how to say it. 

The Presidency involves symbolic and executive functions. Like no President before him, Reagan specialized exclusively in the symbolic ones, to the point of getting lost in fantasy. He would recount, with tears, a conversation between two doomed airmen in a falling plane. Those men didn’t exist, but there was a similar scene in the 1944 film “Wing and a Prayer.” Reagan was obsessed with the idea that a space shield could stop nuclear missiles—much like the “inertia projector” from his 1940 B movie “Murder in the Air.” He occasionally referred to himself as the Gipper, the nickname of one of his characters, and when a reporter asked him the name of his dog, Millie, Reagan replied, “Lassie.” 

Reagan hovered above the material plane, and others indulged him. “You wanted to help Reagan to float through life,” his longtime adviser Michael Deaver explained. “You’d be willing to do whatever it took to take the load off of him of all the shitty little things that normal people have to do.” 

Those “shitty little things” included running the country. Deaver was sometimes called the “deputy President,” but others bore that title, too—the whole Administration ran on delegation. The President offered little guidance even when it came to taxes, his signature issue. “In the four years that I served as Secretary of the Treasury, I never saw President Reagan alone and never discussed economic philosophy or fiscal and monetary policy with him oneon-one,” Don Regan recalled. “The President never told me what he believed or what he wanted to accomplish.” Without direction, Reagan’s aides—the fellas—held extraordinary power. He accepted their views (though he sometimes fell asleep while they presented them), and he rarely sought outside counsel. 

Auteur theory interprets films as fundamentally the creations of directors. A similar notion prevails in politics: the idea that Presidents are fully in charge. But when has that ever been true? Reagan knew, from his years on f ilm and television sets, that the face of a production is just a part of it. There was something refreshingly honest in his ceding policymaking to those who knew more than he did. There was also something ironic: Reagan, the foe of bureaucracy, surrendering to the state. 

Reagan’s hands-off, eyes-closed approach had upsides, Boot argues. Mainly, it freed his Administration to act pragmatically. Its greatest triumph here was the turn to peace with Moscow. Boot dismisses the myths that Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall or single-handedly ended the Cold War. But he rightly credits the White House for entering into unexpected, productive negotiations with the Kremlin. 

Much of the glory belongs to the fellas. For decades, Reagan had demonized Communists. Yet in early 1983, just as Reagan was publicly attacking the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world,” the Secretary of State, George Shultz, guided him to speak privately with Soviet officials. Then, to remedy what the nationalsecurity adviser, Bud McFarlane, called the President’s uneven command of historical facts, McFarlane brought in the writer Suzanne Massie. She helped Reagan understand Russians as religious, entrepreneurial people suffering under the yoke of an overweening government. It was a resonant story. In fact, it was the one Reagan had long told about his own country. 

With a new script in hand, Reagan was ready. An alarmed aide recalled how Shultz prepared Reagan for a meeting with the Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, by giving him stage directions for what to do “in this scene.” Still, Reagan hit his marks. He greeted Gorbachev with openness, and, astonishingly, the two set out to eliminate their countries’ nuclear arsenals. 

They might have succeeded, too, had Reagan’s fantasies not intruded. His political career was defined by three great delusions: that Communists were close to seizing the United States, that cutting taxes would increase government revenues, and that satellite weapons (particle beams, lasers) could stop all nuclear missiles. At a summit in Iceland in 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev nearly agreed to a ten-year plan for total nuclear disarmament, but Reagan wouldn’t abide limits on U.S. outerspace defenses. 

“Almost no government officials” believed such defenses would be feasible “in any realistic time-frame,” Boot writes. Yet Reagan had faith in them, insisted on them, and scotched the deal with Gorbachev over them. (A year later, he agreed to arms reductions.) Today, the United States and Russia collectively possess more than ten thousand nuclear warheads. And, despite Trump’s promises to build “a great Iron Dome over our country,” satellite defenses against nuclear attacks remain unviable. 

Although he didn’t stick the landing, Reagan’s coöperation with Communists was nonetheless extraordinary. He had relinquished “the dogmas of a lifetime,” Boot writes. “Few other leaders have shown as much boldness or f lexibility in changing with the times.” 76It’s hard not to notice that the virtues Boot lauds in Reagan are the ones he’s cultivated in himself. This biography carries a pointed message for conservatives: Reagan achieved greatness by abandoning his ideology. He could listen, Boot argues, and he could change. 

Adaptability can be an admirable quality. Did Reagan possess it, though? “He was, yes, pragmatic like any successful politician,” Rick Perlstein writes in “The Invisible Bridge” (2014). But when Reagan bowed to reality—repeatedly raising taxes to make up for budgetary shortfalls—he rarely learned from it. His “habit of parsing the world into black-and-white” didn’t lessen with experience, Perlstein observes. “In some ways, it even deepened.” In 1987, far into his diplomacy with the Soviets, Reagan reassured an ultraconservative supporter: “I’m still the R.R. I was, and the evil empire is still just that.” 

One wonders how much Reagan was adapting, and how much he was deferring. The White House included people who sought peace with Moscow. It included those who favored balanced budgets, too. Reagan agreed with them, as he agreed with most people near him. But there were few voices in his orbit when it came to, say, defending social services. There was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development—Samuel Pierce, Reagan’s sole Black Cabinet member—but he seemed uninspired, and, on one occasion, Reagan mistook him for a city mayor. Most of the Administration’s top hundred officials had been selected by Reagan’s wealthy backers, and more than a quarter had net worths in the millions. No one was bringing writers to the Oval Office to paint the President word pictures about economic insecurity. 

The Administration was at its most blinkered in Central America and the Caribbean. The President had strong instincts here; he saw the region’s Marxist movements as menacing the United States. Speaking of El Salvador to Canada’s Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, Reagan predicted that, “if we’re not f irm here, these fellows are going to wind up challenging us in Brownsville, Texas.” Mulroney was flabbergasted. “Ron, there’s not a chance these guys can challenge you anywhere,” he told the President. But Reagan was “mesmerized” by the Communist threat to the south, Boot writes. 

Unfortunately, many under him were also mesmerized. When Reagan fulminated against the Soviet Union, his aides, fearing nuclear war, challenged him. When he fulminated against Central American and Caribbean states, he was pushing on an open door. “Just give me the word and I’ll turn that fucking island into a parking lot,” Secretary of State Al Haig offered, regarding Cuba. Latin America’s strategic insignificance made it a playground where hard-line anti-Communists in the Administration could do what they liked, the historian Greg Grandin argues in “Empire’s Workshop” (2006). 

Reagan saw the bloodiest Latin American battlefields as crucibles of freedom. The White House provided military aid to Guatemala as it carried out, against left-wing and Indigenous Guatemalans, “the worst slaughter in Latin America’s history,” Grandin writes. Reagan protested that Guatemala’s dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, had a “bum rap”; he was “totally committed to democracy.” The Administration also shunted millions to the Contras, guerrillas who killed tens of thousands in their terror campaign against Nicaragua’s Socialist government. They were, Reagan felt, the “moral equal of our Founding Fathers.” Perhaps from Moscow Reagan looked like a pragmatist, but from Managua he looked unhinged. 

In 1983, Grenada’s Marxist government sought to build an airfield with a nine-thousand-foot runway. It requested U.S. aid and, when none came, turned to Cuba. Reagan was alarmed: “Grenada doesn’t even have an air force. Who is it intended for?” In fact, it was intended for tourists; Grenada required a runway that long to land U.S.-built Boeing 747s. But Reagan saw a conspiracy afoot to make the Caribbean a “Red Lake.” After an internal coup, Reagan—guided by his advisers—ordered an invasion. Its ostensible aim was to rescue some U.S. medical students, though the students didn’t see any need. Dozens died (Navy pilots bombed a psychiatric hospital), and the United States occupied the country. The U.N. General Assembly voted to “deeply” deplore this “flagrant violation of international law” by 108–9. “The Americans are worse than the Soviets,” Margaret Thatcher seethed. 

The White House finally faced consequences for its Latin American adventures in 1986, when it was caught using funds from an illegal weapons trade with Iran to provide illegal aid to the Contras. Investigations were launched, officials indicted, and “the entire government seemed to grind to a halt,” Nancy Reagan remembered. Still, the President’s air of obliviousness shielded him. Although he had indeed sought to fund the Contras, the scandal bewildered him. “I don’t think the President, to his dying day, understood,” Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci said. Holding Reagan accountable felt like a category error, like trying to convict a squirrel of trespassing. 

Iran-Contra did nothing to dim his certitudes. After his Presidency, Reagan reflected on the Grenada invasion. He believed that he had acted as an instrument of God. He quoted a U.S. pilot who noted that Grenada produced nutmeg, an ingredient in eggnog. The “Russians were trying to steal Christmas,” the pilot insisted. “We stopped them.” 

At the start of this century, it seemed that Reagan’s legacy to conservatism would be his wide-eyed faith in freedom, the “magic of the marketplace,” and American innocence. Today’s G.O.P., however, is more cynical, more interested in fighting trade wars than spreading capitalism. The Reaganite values that most endure are the reactionary ones: his hostility toward civil rights, feminism, and the welfare state. 

Boot has given up on defending Reagan’s values. Hence his last-ditch defense of Reagan as a pragmatist. Reagan’s two tendencies—he had wild ideas but went with the flow—match the warring Republican factions today: the MAGA firebrands and the establishment conservatives. Boot sides with the establishment and so likes the pliable Reagan best. “I’d rather get eighty per cent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flags flying,” Reagan said. One suspects that Boot would have preferred Reagan at sixty per cent. 

In the eyes of the MAGA set, Boot has been co-opted by the Beltway élite. His critics cackled recently when his wife, Sue Mi Terry, was indicted for serving a foreign country as an unregistered agent. Terry allegedly took pay from South Korea, including in the form of expensive handbags, to push its positions, including in an article written with Boot. She also stands accused of passing along “nonpublic” governmental information and introducing South Korean spies to U.S. officials over drinks. (Terry’s attorney has said that she “strongly denies” the allegations.) Even if the charges are true, they’re closer to well-lubricated networking than cloak-and-dagger spycraft. But this is precisely the sort of slippery insider business that makes everyone hate Washington. 

Boot is more alert to the pathologies of ideology than to those of the establishment. He lauds Reagan for taking cues from clear-eyed officials. He has less to say about the contexts, like Latin America, in which officials acquiesced to, or even amplified, the President’s excesses. 

This is the prospect we face today. Trump’s first term was, in Boot’s sense, Reaganesque, in that Trump’s aides sometimes managed to thwart or redirect his ambitions. Trump promised to build the wall and lock her up, yet he did neither. A second Trump term might not be so halting. Republicans have constructed a world around Trump’s delusions, in which Mexicans are bloodthirsty invaders, Democrats are Communists, and the 2020 election was stolen. With enough willing officials in place, these will become not the idiosyncratic beliefs of the President but the agreed-on facts of the government. 

Asked about one of Reagan’s persistent lies, his press secretary Larry Speakes shrugged: “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.” This might be Reagan’s most lasting contribution to politics. Presidents had lied before, some egregiously. Reagan, however, fabricated an alternate reality. The country no longer expected truth from the world’s most powerful individual. It no longer expected comprehension, even. Reagan’s job was making myths. The problems came when people believed them. 

BRIEFLY NOTED 

The Missing Thread, by Daisy Dunn (Viking). This engaging book, by a classical historian, surveys three thousand years and argues that women were more integral to the development of the ancient world than prevailing narratives suggest. Dunn’s subjects include Pandora, whom Greek mythology identifies as the “first woman”; Locusta, the toxicologist who helped Agrippina to poison Claudius; Fulvia, a late Roman politician who raised an army after her daughter was scorned by a lover; and the scores of anonymous Etruscan women who maintained a thriving quasi-matriarchy until the Roman ascendancy. “Women are everywhere that antiquity raises its head,” Dunn writes. “They are the authors of our history.” Life as No One Knows It, by Sara Imari Walker (Riverhead). In this treatise, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist posits a new account of life: Assembly Theory, which identifies the threshold between nonliving and living complex objects— anything from a rock to a coffee cup to a human being—by counting the “steps” it takes for the universe to assemble them from their smaller parts. (In the lab, Walker and her team found that, on Earth, objects with an assembly index below f ifteen steps are nonliving.) Assembly Theory has already attracted much attention, but more compelling is its underpinning idea of a “new physics” that places information front and center. “The fundamental unit of life,” Walker argues, “is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time.” 

Bright Objects, by Ruby Todd (Simon & Schuster). The protagonist of this layered début novel, set in 1997, is a young funeral attendant named Sylvia, who lives in a small town in Australia and is planning her suicide. Sylvia sets the date for it on the second anniversary of her husband’s death in a hitand-run, but, before the time comes, she falls in love with an American astronomer working at a nearby observatory, where he discovered a comet that some townspeople have since endowed with conspiratorial significance. As Sylvia attempts to track down the driver who killed her husband, the book develops the momentum of a thriller; meanwhile, the astronomer’s skepticism about drawing meaning from the stars enriches the text with the provocations of a philosophical novel. 

Napalm in the Heart, by Pol Guasch, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Written in lyrical, if brutal, fragments, this dystopian novel takes place in an unnamed country riven by military strife and environmental disaster. Its narrator, a young man who lives in the forest with his mother, sustains himself by writing letters to his city-dwelling boyfriend. But, following a violent confrontation with a soldier, the young man embarks on a harrowing drive across a post-apocalyptic landscape, encountering mercenaries and desperate refugees along the way. If Guasch’s formally inventive approach can sometimes risk murkiness, the beauty of his prose shores up his story, in which language, love, family, and home are in constant peril.