THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF BANANA REPUBLIC'S TRIPS

A veteran author explores contemporary American culture and politics in this genre-bending anthology.

As the founder of the creative writing program at Arizona State University and author of multiple compilations of short stories and plays, Young is known for artistic experimentation. Here, he offers readers a commentary on contemporary politics and culture through multiple genres. The book begins with five essays, which include two memoiristic vignettes that center on two of the author’s five brothers. His youngest sibling, Gordon, is the only post–baby boomer of the bunch. Not only is there a 10-year generational difference between Gordon and the author, he notes, but there are also social and cultural differences in their approaches to life. Another essay centers on the failed publication Trips, a magazine published by the Banana Republic clothing chain. Dedicating itself to “re-vision[ing] our world,” the publication claimed to offer “authentic” stories that eschewed traditional travel writing to tout travel as “a great teacher” about the human condition. The fact that the magazine was discontinued after a single issue, Young writes insightfully, is related to its failed approach toward authenticity. Just as Banana Republic’s clothing boasts names of fictious organizations, such as the “Ivory Coast Safari Club,” American consumers, despite declarations otherwise, “don’t want ‘authentic’ immersion in a foreign culture,” Young asserts. The book’s second section, a collection of 15 poems, is similarly perceptive on topics that range from the value of cooperation to teenage Instagram culture. “Pandemic,” a poem centered on responses to Covid-19, satirically targets those who refused to wear a mask and submit to “the tyranny of evidence.”

As strong as the book’s first half is, its second half falls flat. The third section offers readers a sampling of five short plays, most of which are based on conversations between a carefully selected demographic selection of Americans that borders on stereotype. One play, for instance, features a group of Black and Hispanic young men on an outdoor basketball court in Los Angeles who seek to “enlighten” a 50-year-old white player wearing a Hoosiers T-shirt. Although there’s potential for constructive interracial discourse in this scene, the interchange is stilted with political tropes and, cringingly, a biracial character’s use of the “hard R” in his pronunciation of a racial epithet. The book’s final section (“The Big Lie”) deploys similarly forced, unnatural dialogue in its characters’ conversations about Donald Trump. In a book that’s fewer than 175 pages in length, the plays suffer from excessive brevity and a lack of character development. What detracts from the anthology’s fictional writings, though, enhances its poetry; one of the book’s most powerful pieces is a two-line poem (“Boycott”) on Chinese foreign policy: “Hong Kong is gone. / Save Taiwan.” The book could have used an introductory or concluding chapter to ease readers into the rationale behind its eclectic approach as well as introduce themes that connect the sections. The abrupt transitions between genres without editorial commentary makes for a disjointed read that takes away from the book’s often insightful musings.

An uneven but sometimes-perceptive take on modern America.