RaveThe MillionsPart of the thrill of Nevada Days is to marvel at a family’s ceaseless desire to explore America at a crossroads during the limited time they have ... For the Americans he will call his neighbors, colleagues, and friends during the next nine months, this silence is what we accept as reality, what we don’t protest: military helicopters as common as hawks in the sky, the anesthetizing bad news reaching us from Iraq and Afghanistan, health insurance too expensive to afford, biased documentaries and news programs that celebrate our military history, the business of incarcerating a large percentage of Americans, elementary schools running active-shooter drills, the economic exploitation of brown bodies, sexual assaults on college campuses, etc. Atxaga becomes the frog introduced late to the boiling pot in which the rest of us obliviously sit ... One assumes that the novel was a fascinating sort of travelogue for his Basque and Spanish readers—a report on America from one of their country’s most gifted storytellers. For Americans, though, in the five years since the novel’s publication, the chronicle of Atxaga and his family’s unflagging enthusiasm as they look for this thing called America may offer us something far more necessary—what the family discovers is the prologue to the country we find ourselves in today.
