THE PATRIOT'S GRILL

Day’s debut novel imagines the United States in 2099 as a dystopian, authoritarian-corporate police state, where a disgruntled, radicalized bartender explores how the dictatorship came into being.

In the near future, the nation, embroiled in constant wars with other countries, is deep into its “New Era” of totalitarianism featuring corrupt presidents, unregulated corporations, and environmental fallout from climate change. Although the state pays lip service to “freedom,” the populace is sent to compulsory Public Bible School and Patriotism Camp and is routinely terrorized by widespread surveillance and threats of torture and execution by the dreaded Internal Security Service. Propaganda, meanwhile, claims that unseen saboteurs and terrorists lurk everywhere. In Loyalty, Kansas—one of several polluted, industrial-nightmare towns erected on the Great Plains—Joe Carlton, who once harbored acting ambitions, subsists unhappily as a bartender, serving factory drones after their 12-hour shifts. An atypical patron arrives: an old man who was politically active in the distant past, as American society shifted toward scoundrels and capitalists. His talk of freedom of expression and travel is new to Joe; such things have been erased from historical records (as have books such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird), and the barkeep’s first impulse is betrayal. But seeds of rebellion have been planted, leading Joe into forbidden sectors of town and asking how this dystopia came to be. The author's dire extrapolation of current headlines doesn’t specifically name Republicans or Democrats, but when Day characterizes a long-ago president-villain as a “dolt” and “Intellectually incurious, corrupt, self-centered, [and] lawless,” it’s an easy reference to figure out. The book’s setting and regime often feel like the worst aspects of Cold War Albania or North Korea superimposed upon a society based on corporate greed, and an Orwellian chill wind of hopeless oppression blows through most of the plot. Day does offer a solution in the end—with a war of ideas rather than brute force—so sympatico readers may be assured that present difficult times shall pass; others may be less reassured.

A vividly morose prophecy of an ugly, reactionary surveillance state leavened slightly by its finale.