Oscar Rickett
Motown Funk
You Don't Have to Live Like This
By Benjamin Markovits
Faber & Faber 391pp £14.99
The story of the rise and fall of Detroit is catnip to reporters and photographers. Once a mighty industrial hub, Michigan’s largest city was the home of the American motorcar, the birthplace of the Motown sound and, at its peak in the 1950s, a thriving metropolis of nearly two million people. But with the subsequent decline of American industry came the decline of the city, and Detroit became a byword for some of the most troubling issues facing the nation, including racial violence, drugs wars and municipal bankruptcy following years of municipal kleptocracy. Writers came to write of decay. Photographers came to photograph it. Every magazine in the world must have run a Detroit photo story showing weeds thriving in the place of bricks and mortar.
Recently, gentrification projects backed by both public and private sectors have been put into motion in some of Detroit’s half-abandoned, half-decimated neighbourhoods. It is a fictionalised version of one such project that forms the backdrop to Benjamin Markovits’s terrifically readable seventh novel, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, which
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Interview with Iris Murdoch by John Haffenden via @Lit_Review
I love Helen Garner and this, by @chris_power in @Lit_Review, is excellent.
Yesterday was Fredric Jameson's 90th birthday.
This month's Archive newsletter includes Terry Eagleton on The Political Unconscious, and other pieces from our April 1983 issue.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk