The magic of Gish Jen’s latest novel, The Resisters, is that, amid a dark and cautionary tale, there’s a story also filled with electricity and humor ... These characters wrestle with conundrums that will feel urgent to many readers, such as how to teach children to be fearless yet not reckless, to be responsible yet independent, to stand up for what’s right without becoming imprisoned or imperiled along the way ... Written in Jen’s clear, assured style and delivered from Grant’s slyly ironic perspective, The Resisters will captivate readers. Rippling with action, suspense and lovingly detailed baseball play-by-plays, there’s a sense throughout the book of both celebration and danger. There are a few plot point workarounds to maintain Grant’s first-person perspective—including an overly convenient listening device. But the story retains its intimacy and human generosity, even as it’s told against a backdrop of dreadful things to come. This novel’s great gift to readers is its rich and multifaceted characters.
This is a dark, frightening and triumphantly original work, a 1984 for our time. It’s the author’s brilliant decision to pit the delights of the All-American pastime, baseball, as antidote to the rigors of the surveillance state. Pleasure versus pain, leisure versus labor, freedom versus regimentation ... perfectly nimble and precise, with just a dollop of humor ... Jen’s terse sentences and short scenes create an irresistible forward momentum. Her dialogue veers from witty (the family) to eerie (the robotic watchers and a few robotic humans) to shamefully naive (Net U. students) By contrast, she makes the Cannon-Chastenets into believable, fully rounded characters. And genuine heroes ... Don’t dare call this fantasy or science fiction. This is a world all too terrifying, dangerous and real.
Jen has too much humor and heart as a writer to do a full-out futuristic nightmare. Instead, the feel of The Resisters is more like that noir sequence embedded within It's a Wonderful Life ... Life in the America of The Resisters is tense, but the wry tone of Jen's characters assures readers that this state of affairs won't be permanent ... primarily plot-driven and its appeal rests on its ingenuity, which is unflagging ... I confess: I like the romantic idea of baseball much more than the reality of reading about or watching the game, so I appreciated that Jen kept her 'inside baseball' descriptions short and sporadic. The power of The Resisters derives, instead, from Jen's inventive elaboration on how the change happened; how Americans gratefully handed over their autonomy to a big combo of machines, AI and the omnipotent Internet ... As speculative fiction goes, this inspired vision of how Americans bought into the sedating fantasy of less stress, less thinking and boundless leisure time hits close to the bone. But, with her characteristic generosity and restrained optimism, Jen doesn't scold or despair. In The Resisters, she offers hope that, after a long, misbegotten seventh-inning stretch, Americans of the near future will be eager to once again play ball and take up the hard work of participatory democracy.
Gish Jen’s fifth novel imagines a dystopia so chillingly plausible ... [a] gripping tale of a family confronting the digitally empowered authoritarian state ... Jen doesn’t over-explain individual elements of her richly textured dystopia; she assumes we can deduce the meanings of her bitingly witty neologisms ... Over the course of three decades, Jen’s social and psychological observations have only sharpened, while her marvelous humor has darkened ... amusing but vaguely menacing, frequently with a sting to follow ... Jen’s closing pages invite optimism about the prospects for change[.]
... timely ... This intricately imagined novel is ostensibly set in the near future, though it sometimes reads less like prophecy and more like present-day journalism ... inventive... might be the only dystopian novel whose climax involves a tense, high-stakes baseball game ... The power of speculative fiction often lies in its ability to make us look at the world around us with fresh eyes. Mundane acts have a way of becoming extraordinarily beautiful when we are faced with the prospect of their vanishing. Here, baseball becomes a site of resistance, an emblem of humanity, an antidote to the automation and artificial intelligence that controls every other aspect of life in AutoAmerica ... a marvelously refreshing concept in a world that is otherwise dominated by algorithms ... a book that grows directly out of the soil of our current political moment, and much of the book’s unsettling pleasure lies in Jen’s ingenious extrapolation of contemporary problems ... Jen has such a gifted ear for the manipulative languages of tech, marketing and government that at times the sheer abundance of clever details threatens to overwhelm the stories of her characters. But perhaps this overabundance is part of the novel’s method, a way of swallowing the characters and the reader into AutoAmerica’s reality ... ultimately quite tender.
...[a] densely imagined if static new novel ... Much of the futuristic language Jen deploys, her portmanteaus, reflects the banality of both corporate uplift ... and state-sponsored evil ... Into this totalitarian landscape, like a flower slipped into the barrel of a rifle, Jen inserts an almost old-fashioned baseball novel ... Jen...is a wonderfully gifted writer. But The Resisters is not among her best novels; it never sinks its hooks into the reader ... In part, this is because we have dystopian novel overload, a condition Jill Lepore diagnosed in The New Yorker a few years ago. In part, too, it’s because Jen exerts so much effort constructing her world, this book’s hardware, that the human software is underdeveloped. There’s not a lot of human juice here, those micro-pleasures of perception that fill much of her earlier fiction; there’s merely a rolling scenario ... Once in a while, this novel opens a small box of dread. But there’s a tameness here, too. You know there’s going to be a big game at the end. You sense that, within certain limits, everything is going to be okay. To borrow imagery from a less literary sport, you feel that this novel’s bowling lane has bumper rails.
... a harrowingly, bizarrely imagined future. The award-winning author...has long had a feel for sweeping, subversive explorations of American life ... This is not Jen’s wittiest work, but it holds a brilliant mundanity.
... inventive but muddled ... Gwen's ethical deliberations are obscured by the fact that Jen tells the story from the point of view of her lackluster father, Grant. Half of the book's action takes place out of his sight, and is laboriously constructed in letters home, speculation, and, finally, a bug he plants on Gwen when she goes away to university. As a result, Gwen has little interiority ... There is a better model in Gwen's lawyer mother Eleanor, who sues the government for human rights violations. But Gwen's own actions never attain the same moral stakes, and the novel's ethics ultimately feel confused ... baseball is also a real sport, and The Resisters finds no tactile joy in it, nothing that would call up glove snaps, bat cracks, or the smell of grass. The games themselves feel interminable, metaphorically weighted but bloodless ... Jen will occasionally write a perfect sentence...But more often, the internet language feels artificial ... Jen's most perceptive points come out in worldbuilding.
Gish Jen’s The Resisters comes close...[to] pulling off the feat of making the unlikely pairing of baseball and a dystopian setting seem like a natural fit ... in portraying an American dystopia where baseball—a symbol of freedom and the American dream—is played in secret and where zoning laws have forced the Surplus to live in swampland, Jen not only echoes the discriminatory policies of redlining but also amplifies contemporary concerns about income equality, the whittling away of civil liberties, and limited access to essential services in the poorer parts of the US (for example the five-year water crisis in Flint MI) ... The novel’s denouement (which I won’t spoil) brings this to the fore in a manner that cleverly plays against the traditional baseball-movie climax and sees the baton of hope and resistance passed on to the next generation. With The Resisters, Gish Jen provides a new angle to the dystopian narrative, while doing justice to that great American literary sport: baseball.
On the list of passions that are as American as apple pie, the game of baseball occupies a prominent place. That's what makes its presence at the heart of Gish Jen's clever dystopian novel The Resisters so meaningful, and so disquieting ... Jen revels in creating a fully realized world that's sufficiently recognizable yet infused with enough alien elements to qualify as frighteningly realistic speculation on a potential future. There, ubiquitous surveillance approaches its apotheosis and climate change doesn't lag far behind. Blending realistic family drama with sly social commentary turbocharged by its author's eerie vision of the future, The Resisters raises a host of provocative questions about what a ruthless combination of omnipresent technology and economic inequality might look like. George Orwell would be proud. And scared.
Jen masterfully builds her dystopian world, depicting how easily such a change can creep over a populace too ready to trade liberty for convenience ... Though Jen seems to relish the world-building aspect of dystopian science fiction, The Resisters is, at heart, a story about love, family, and the core values of freedom and independence. The humor here is drier and more wry than in Jen’s past efforts; the bleak reality of AutoAmerica (and the degree to which it feels credible, if not inevitable) darkens the moments of levity.
The Resisters is most exciting because its dystopian world is relayed in Gish’s trademark style, with her crisp, vivid prose and occasionally vicious, often lovable and completely human characters ... Jen's...an expert at writing about parents and children, about how the expectations of one generation can influence the actions of another ... One of the more satisfying elements of the world that Jen introduces here is how easy it is to extrapolate our current world into it ... Jen holds up a mirror and allows us to see where we’re wrong right now ... She has fun with the dystopian elements of The Resisters without undermining her purpose, which appears to be a commentary on the ways we’re ruining the world and each other. It’s particularly satisfying to see her place the blame firmly in the reader’s own hands, forcing us to acknowledge that the damage we’ve done to ourselves has been a choice rather than something inevitable.
This book is narrated by Grant, whose first-person point of view replicates the invasive, spying atmosphere that pervades the novel. Access to Eleanor and Gwen’s thoughts would add to the narrative’s complexity, but Jen world-builds effortlessly. Newly coined words become part of your own parlance within pages as you come to understand this world ... Jen takes us on an entertaining ride in a new yet familiar world as we contemplate that 'it was we who made our world what it was. It was we who were responsible.'
If you’re going to write a dystopian novel in our increasingly dystopian world (climate change! creeping fascism! coronavirus!), you may as well have some fun with it. Gish Jen certainly does ... a rabble-rousing tale with an ominous edge to it ... The winning, suspenseful heart of the book is Gwen’s resourceful action on the field (and I’m saying that as a total baseball illiterate). Jen’s jauntily sinister AutoAmerican argot is a continual pleasure as well ... Best of all is her take on why even the ultimate surveillance society can’t quite muffle the human spirit.
Jen writes electric, entertaining sentences. I can hear the author having fun here and throughout the book. It’s baseball that gives The Resisters its shape, and this is effective even if you, as I, hate baseball. In sport, Jen finds a metaphor for what it is to be human ... Works that posit an alternate world have to expend some energy on establishing that reality’s texture. Jen relishes world building maybe too much ... Authors possess authority, and Jen squanders hers on set dressing when she might simply establish the world’s contours and let the reader do the rest ... The unnamed narrator is tasked with all this authorial explaining, and it makes him a tiresome companion. He is our Sherpa, but ends up feeling like a know-it-all. And while maybe it makes sense that the introductory pages would need to tell us how to read the book, the third of the book’s four sections lays bare the flaw in the overall design ... The Resisters’ final section shows that Jen is a canny architect, the story more carefully crafted than it might seem. Details from the novel’s early pages become newly resonant in this last inning—perhaps my fault, but I had trouble recalling them, and never felt the epiphany the author was reaching for.
The baseball scenes in The Resisters are a joy for readers who are fans of the sport, as well as for those with only a passing interest in it. Not only does Jen offer a vivid description of baseball action, she also incorporates some humor and commentary on some of its foibles ... Reading this dystopian work is somewhat painful. In contemporary America, where rising oceans are recapturing land masses and children are living in cages, the world described by Gish Jen is difficult to recognize as fiction. But where there is baseball, there is hope. Spring training is now underway, and a new season kicks off in March. In that world, optimism and the promise of a fresh start abound. Play ball!
Jen’s stealthy wit lures us into contemplation of our worst failings and our saving graces ... In this astutely realized and unnervingly possible depiction of a near-future world, Jen masterfully entwines shrewd mischief, knowing compassion, and profound social critique in a suspenseful tale encompassing baseball ardor, family love, newly insidious forms of racism and tyranny, and a wily and righteous resistance movement that declares 'RIGHT MAKES MIGHT.'
This intriguing departure from Jen...tells a dire tale of nonconformity in a world gone mad ... Though her talent and aplomb win out in a satisfying conclusion, Gwen struggles with the inequality and oppression of AutoAmerica, and readers will be left wondering whether we are living in such a culture today. Highly recommended for discerning readers.
Subtle dystopian fiction ... What's most remarkable about the worldbuilding here is that the sense of horror that suffuses so much dystopian fiction is absent. Grant’s tone is wryly matter-of-fact—perhaps because, as a dark-skinned person, he never took the freedoms and opportunities he once had for granted. And, really, the totalitarian country he describes is entirely believable ... The juxtaposition of America’s pastime and the AI–enabled surveillance state Jen presents here is brilliant. Sports are a classic national obsession as well as an avenue to fame and success for the disenfranchised. In this sense, Gwen’s story feels familiar, and the ease with which the reader identifies with this narrative helps to make everything else about AutoAmerica seem eerily familiar, too. We recognize the world Jen creates because it is, finally, nearly identical to our own ... Beautifully crafted and slyly unsettling.
...[a] shrewd and provocative near-future novel from Jen ... While some of Jen’s fans might miss the overt humor of her previous work, her intelligence and control shine through in a chilling portrait of the casual acceptance of totalitarianism.
