Though gifted at baseball, young Gwen is part of the "Surplus," a mass of disenfranchised people living on the edges of a future society in AutoAmerica—an America that has embraced authoritarian automation. Gwen grows up playing baseball in secret, but when her talent is discovered, she is recruited by Net U, the university for the privileged. She reluctantly agrees to attend and has her moral and personal resolve severely tested.
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.
