Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they view their fellow Americans and navigate AI-suffused life in 2045. After twenty-three years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States). Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling—confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate. When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their seventeen-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all while dealing with the flux—and resilience—within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?
Brilliantly imagined ... The will-they-or-won’t-they domestic drama of the Zimbalists, when it finally gets out of the driveway, is less than suspenseful; it is very much like spending a week in a car with three people laughing at a series of inside jokes and then explaining to you why those jokes are funny. But so what? ... What readers of The Breakup will come for, in this moment of what seems like unsustainable polarization and anger and wanton trampling of American civic institutions and ideals, is a vision of our near-term future that is violent and admonitory and cathartically terrible and yet somehow still survivable. On that score, Andersen delivers the dopamine hit that has made his previous work best sellers.
There is too much going on here for this novel to work, but Andersen is an uncommon writer, a skilled historical novelist as well as an astute cultural observer and historical interpreter ... It takes a while for the road trip to start, but once it does, I found myself invested in the well-being of these people ... Andersen keeps introducing threats, both external and internal, and the reader can’t help but worry ... A one-of-a-kind book that only this writer could produce.
Sprightly ... For a speculative state-of-the-nation novel, The Breakup is refreshingly full of absorbing characters ... Is in many ways an imaginative sequel to his recent nonfiction, except that his polemical gifts are coupled here with a Dickensian flair for comedy.
