Reviews and Comments

A set of satirical short stories about backstabbery, dysfunction and repression in the USSR during the time of (mostly) Stalin (though he's not mentioned by name), with the Borgesian touch that the narrator purports to be analyzing and reconstructing a history from other (fictional?) texts about its characters.

Short, but not a quick read: it's dense with unfamiliar names of places and historical figures, in an abbreviated style that doesn't telegraph where it's going. Some compelling moments and wry dark comedy. Once well-connected people falling out of favor and going to prison, things of that nature. Might get more out of it on a second read through.

Despite being called a novel in a back-cover blurb, each story here stands on its own, with only a rare passing reference to a character in another story.

I read this because William T. Vollmann praised it as an inspiration for Europe Central (and wrote an afterword apparently, but not in my edition), but it didn't click with me as much as that novel did.

A good read for urbanists who would like to dismantle car culture. I already hated cars for their ecological harm, their tendency to kill and maim people, and their greedy consumption of space, destroying both walkable downtowns on one hand and wild/agricultural rural land on the other. This book opened my eyes to a new reason to hate cars: what a trap they are for poor and justice-involved people who have no choice but to drive.

As this book repeatedly reminds us, driving is mandatory in most of the US. You just couldn't hold down a job without it. There are a few exceptions to this rule among people the authors talked to in New York City, but even there, gentrification has made the neighborhoods well-served by the subway increasingly unaffordable to the folks we're talking about. And as for their interview subjects in the Indianapolis area, fuhgeddaboutit.

But owning a car is expensive. So people get out of prison, having "paid their debt to society," and find themselves in a catch-22: you need a job to have a car, but you need a car to have a job. Not only that, their credit scores are often wrecked from defaulting on the car loan they had before they did time, and sometimes from falling victim to identity theft while in prison. Several people the authors talk to have had to save up hundreds and borrow thousands of dollars to pay off tickets and fines, including tickets they supposedly incurred while in prison: it can be easier to pay up than challenge the DMV on its errors.

As people try to rebuild their lives and credit, they're constantly at risk of going back to jail and having to start over due to a minor mistake. One person the authors talked to had to make three separate two-hour bus trips to get their drivers' license renewed, because each time they had to queue for hours for various bureaucratic tasks, and then rush home before they were finished to make the checkin time at their court-mandated halfway house. Vincent Thompson, a peer researcher for the book, was on parole when stopped by police supposedly for an underinflated tire. He ended up getting evicted, losing his security deposit and all his possessions when the landlord dumped them outside, losing his job, and being jailed for another eight months because the cop found a trivial amount of cannabis, which the state was in the process of decriminalizing at the time.

Poor, justice-involved drivers are also exploited at every turn by both public and private predators: cities gouge them with fees and fines to balance municipal budgets, while banks and car dealers target them with usurious subprime loans, knowing they can repossess the car, make a profit, and go on to the next victim even if the driver can't repay the loan. A final chapter discusses how "smart" cars, camera networks, facial recognition algorithms, and automated license plate readers (ALPRs) ensnare us all in a growing surveillance dragnet, which is especially dangerous for the book's interviewees who are one small mistake from being reincarcerated, but really should concern us all.

At the conclusion, the authors make suggestions for change: focus traffic enforcement on real safety infractions, not catching debtors (and use income-graduated fines), close loopholes around usury laws, remove the backdoor to debtor's prison, fund municipalities through progressive taxation instead of fines, dismantle surveillance, and, the urbanist's favorite one, demolish urban freeways and invest in transit, walking and biking. It's a thoughtful overview of the intersection of car culture and the carceral system, and a call to action. I just wish it had an index.

An at times brilliant book. Many times I wanted to stand up and applaud because these essays perfectly summed up something that bugs me when doing activism, like:

• "Naive Cynicism," on scolds who tell you what you want to achieve is unrealistic, so forget about it.
• "Preaching to the Choir," on the value of talking to people you already agree with, to deepen your understanding and alignment and keep one another motivated.
• "In Praise of Indirect Consequences," on how efforts that may seem to be failures reverberate, inspiring or enabling great successes later.

I also appreciated the essays on climate change as violence, and the in-depth discussion of the factors in Alex Nieto's killing by the San Francisco Police Department. All of these, and more, remain relevant.

Parts of this book on the 2016 election and the Trump presidency have aged less well. You'll be reminded of news cycles that seemed like a big deal when they were filling your Twitter feed, but that haven't turned out to be that era's significant milestones, for better or worse.

Well worth picking up, but given the Trump minutiae, perhaps read selectively.