THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 15IN “THE DEATH AND LIFEof Great Ameri-
can Cities,” Jane Jacobs describes her
perfect neighborhood — Greenwich Vil-
lage, circa 1961. Gentrification has begun
but not uprooted the working-class com-
munity that preceded it. You get a mix of
old and new buildings, some cheap, some
expensive, which include apartments,
houses, shops, offices, restaurants, cafes.
Different kinds of people live there and
work there, and the variety itself sustains
the new community, because at any point
in the day you might have a freelancer
typing away in the cafe, or a builder buy-
ing tools from the hardware store, or
schoolchildren walking home, or drinkers
emerging from the bar, which stays open
until 3 a.m., so that the street is always
busy and the residents feel safe. This is
one reason she hated the suburbs —
empty streets.
Tochi Onyebuchi credits Jacobs in the
acknowledgments of “Goliath,” his new
novel, as someone whose books “did more
than anything else to reshape how I think
about the metropole and all the different
ways a city can be occupied.” The story
begins with a curious echo of that Green-
wich Village moment: Jonathan and Da-
vid, a gay white couple, have decided to
return to Earth from the space colonies.
Jonathan, playing pioneer, arrives first
and wants to buy a house in New Haven,
which has been devastated by a series of
political and environmental disasters that
predate the novel. Earth and air have be-
come radioactive and cancerous. You
need a face mask to breathe safely, unless
you’re one of the lucky few who live in a
Dome, a kind of filtration bubble. In any
case, most of the upper-middle classes
have been partly cyberized, “augmented”
in ways that allow them to replace can-
cerous organs and even detox their sys-
tems after a drug binge. The real danger,
people warn Jonathan, is “gangs.”
It’s an ingenious premise: Onyebuchi
suburbanizes outer space and makes bat-
tered, almost uninhabitable provincial
America the frontier. “Best thing that
coulda happened to the planet was all the
white folks left it,” thinks one of the men
left behind. Except now the white folks
are coming back. The novel shifts from
Jonathan’s and David’s stories to follow
various “stackers” as they go about their
daily lives — local wrecking crews,
mostly Black, whose job it is to tear down
uninhabited houses (using fancy new
technology) and rummage through the
remains for reusable bricks. The head of
one crew is a man named Bishop, an ex-
con and a lay preacher, whose moral au-
thority pervades the novel, though his ag-
ing body can barely keep up with the
work. Even his wisdom has almost been
exhausted by dealing with the endless re-
petitiveness of oppression.
The stackers’ lives soon take over the
novel. There’s a brief overlap, when
Bishop helps Jonathan electrify his new
house, but Jacobs’s Greenwich Village
moment never really happens. Of course,
you could tell this story without the sci-
ence-fiction machinery but part of the
point is to undermine the consolations of
straight realism, the sense of deep roots,
things fitting together, even if unhappily.
Characters in the novel still wear their fa-
vorite Red Sox caps or smoke Newports
or refer to an account of a house party
that spills out of control as “an Atlanta-
ass story.” These fragments of the old
world matter to people but there aren’t
enough of them to build a meaningful life.
They have to start over from scratch.IN ITS SCALE AND AMBITION,“Goliath” has
the feel of a Tom Wolfe novel, but there
isn’t really any central action or plot that
forces the different characters, up and
down the class ladder, into contact and
conflict with one another. The story
jumps between points of view and moves
backward and forward in time. It also
showcases an impressive range of regis-
ters — from the painful self-explanations
of a Yale-educated Black prison inmate
(one of the high points of the book), to the
embarrassing but well-meaning report-
age of a white journalist who wants to tell
the stackers’ story, to the “No Country for
Old Men”-style account of marshals on
the trail across North Texas for the grave
of a murdered boy.
How all this hangs together matters
less in the end than the picture of a bro-
ken America these stories present. It’s a
kind of postapocalyptic “Our Town.”
Characters with different back stories
wander onstage and reveal themselves.
This puts a lot of pressure on each scene
to deliver meaningful revelations. Either
something terrible happens in it or peo-
ple tell stories about something terrible
that has happened to them in the past. In
a strange way, though, the stakes remain
low, if only because there’s so little hope
that their lives will ever get better. The
closest thing to a central plotline begins
when one of the stackers discovers wild
horses outside New Haven, coming “out
of the shoreline mist in answer to a pray-
er she didn’t even realize she’d uttered.”
Somebody decides to retrieve them and
start a farm, whose real purpose is more
symbolic than practical. Money doesn’t
seem to matter much.
The novel’s worldview is based on the
idea that the truest thing about people istheir pain, and their most important daily
task is the management of that pain. Oc-
casionally they even get to escape from it
(mostly through love or banter or drugs
or horses) but not for long. “When it came
to grief,” Onyebuchi writes, “sometimes
you ran up the bill and after a while the
number just got meaningless.” There’s a
lot of power to this idea but it also leaves
much out, and sometimes tends to favor
the characters’ most sentimental views of
themselves. David and Jonathan meet at
a space hospital, where David is visiting
his mother, who has dementia. Jonathan
offers him a cigarette, which David takes,
even though he doesn’t really smoke. “I
do it because it hurts,” David explains lat-
er. “The smoking.... I like it because it
damages me.” This is all prelude to a
lover’s confession: “Then it all came out,
a waterfall of words.”
David reappears briefly at the end, set-
tled in New Haven now, in a town-hall
meeting that shows how out of touch thereturnees are. (David asks one of the pan-
elists to define “grass roots.”) His pain is
not the issue. And as the novel unfolds,
the question at the heart of Jacobs’s de-
scription of Greenwich Village — how
much gentrification is enough? — also
turns out to miss the point. Inevitably,
tensions between the two communities
reach a climax, and the result is a tragedy
you don’t need to be a science-fiction
writer to imagine. But the speculative
machinery offers a nuance here, too. Ear-
lier in the novel, when Bishop assaults
the city comptroller (he catches him out
jogging and slams a gun against his tem-
ple), to demand more food rations, he
does so partly because he knows the
guy’s “augmented” — no blood comes out,
but a “dent did mar the manufactured
curvature.” There’s nothing morally am-
biguous about the scene, but that also
means there’s no possibility of real com-
promise. The divide has grown too
deep. 0America, the Frontier
A novel imagines what gentrification might look like in a nearly uninhabitable future.
By BENJAMIN MARKOVITS
BENJAMIN MARKOVITS’Smost recent novel is
“Christmas in Austin.”
GOLIATH
By Tochi Onyebuchi
327 pp. Tordotcom. $26.99.
SUNRA THOMPSON