Douglas Kennedy, “And This Is How We Will Live” (Belfond)

The American night. 2045. The United States of America no longer exists, split into two irreconcilable nations. On the East and West coasts, a Republic where freedom of morals and collective surveillance are combined. In the center, a Confederation, theocracy where sex outside marriage is illegal, where the star-spangled banner is systematically accompanied by crucifixes and where it is forbidden to joke in public about Christ. “Our two countries are what remains of a couple after their most bitter and violent divorce: aware that it was impossible to stay together, but still brimming with resentment rather than relief” thinks Samantha Stengel, a Republic Secret Service agent. Although her job prohibits her from showing her emotions, Sam is upset. Maxime, one of his informants who became his friend, was put to death by the opposing camp, his execution broadcast live on the national channel. Breimer, her superior, also tells her that she is the target of a “defusing” – the official term for assassination. And that the Confederate agent in charge of this mission is none other than his half-sister, Caitlin Stengel.

As she prepares to undergo cosmetic surgery to alter her fingerprints, eye color and iris pattern, Sam remembers her parents dancing in their living room the night Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. His father told him then: “When you grow up, you’ll remember that day as the day America got a makeover. » Then “the moment when everything changed, when the growing divisions within the American population became irreparable” occurred in 2016, with the election of Donald Trump. Then aggravated by the Cleveland massacre, 9/11 of Sam’s generation. “But there was no longer any question of international terrorism, Americans were attacking Americans. This was probably the most horrible. »

Extending the portrait of America today initiated with Men are afraid of the light (Belfond, 2022), Douglas Kennedy combines his art of fiction with the observation of current events as they are being written or could be written in the near and probable future. Under his pen, China occupies Taiwan, the American Congress passed a law to prohibit the decriminalization of abortion, the public press no longer receives subsidies and the paper is no longer useful. “The Secession: our only hope for the future” also advocates the tech multi-billionaire elected to head the Republic Morgan Chadwick, whose speeches are reminiscent of those of Elon Musk. If we become attached to the heroine and feverishly follow her mission in enemy territory, we are also disturbed by the mirage of this world so close to ours that Douglas Kennedy sketches with finesse. Because it instills in us images as only fiction can do, And that’s how we’ll live asserts itself as the assumed warning of a writer anchored in an ultra-contemporaneity whose drifts he grasps without needing (and there lies the most terrible thing) to accentuate them.