Empire City: A Novel by Matt Gallagher

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empire City: A Novel by Matt Gallagher Caleb S. Cage (bio) empire city: a novel Matt Gallagher Atria Books https://catalog.simonandschuster.com/TitleDetails/TitleDetails.aspx?cid=1318&isbn=9781501177804&FilterByName=&FilterBy=&FilterVal=&ob=0&pn=1&ed=&showcart=N&camefrom=&find=empire%20city&a= 368 pages; Print, $17.00 Empire City, Matt Gallagher's 2020 novel, is a complex literary work. It tests literary boundaries by being both an alternative history of the United States around the turn of the twenty-first century and also a work of science fiction with characters with superhuman powers. It is a rich and timely social commentary on contemporary America, and it is also an extraordinary literary achievement. Empire City could hold its own in any one of these categories, but Gallagher's daring effort to combine them makes it a remarkable, important, and prescient work. Empire City is set in New York City, here renamed the Empire City, America's first city-state. The establishment of the first city-state is not just due to taxes, as Gallagher puts it simply, but due to an entire chain of alternative events, which he signals throughout the opening chapters. In this America, the American flag has sixty stars and thirteen stripes, a Rockefeller has served as president, there is a Nixon memorial and Westmoreland Plaza, and Tupac is alive and a reality television star. There are countless others, of course, all ranging from mundane to monumental. What is central to the America of Gallagher's novel, though, is that it primarily identifies as the eventual victors of a drawn-out Vietnam War and little else. In this America there is a vibrant warrior class made up of 3 percent of the population, a group that is venerated and valorized for fighting the nation's wars. These warriors, all volunteers and immigrants seeking citizenship, are also venerated for providing examples of duty, meaning, and sacrifice to the broader civilian population, which is mostly engaged in economic life not terribly different from that of the real twenty-first-century America. [End Page 19] Although Gallagher makes it clear that winning the Vietnam War is absolutely central to the national identity, it is almost as clear that the country learned almost all of the wrong lessons from that victory. In the aftermath of that victory, the America of Empire City turned its focus entirely inward, though hardly isolationist. It learned that counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations could successfully defeat guerrilla armies, and it practiced that lesson in countless places around the globe. That is, other countries are mentioned in Empire City only as locations of American occupations and wars, not as sovereign nations with interests, complex local politics, or even as the home to innocent civilians. All of this creates a strange new American exceptionalism for Gallagher's readers to consider. On the one hand, the America of Empire City is economically powerful, militarily ambitious, and unbothered by, even unaware of, the sincere grievances of the people and nations it encounters through the exercise of its power. On the other hand, it has outsourced all of its global adventurism to mercenaries from a small percentage of the population, so much so that the average American can only revere the military service and avoid any of the gruesome details. As Gallagher's narrator puts it: "There were three ways to tell war stories to twenty-first-century Americans: brave, sad, violent. All needed to be clean as a bone. Anything else was too much." An intense political drama plays out within the world Gallagher creates, a drama that reflects all of the social and cultural illnesses and neuroses of such a world. The America of Empire City is divided, even within the warrior class, even as many of the important institutions and freedoms still basically hold. That is, Empire City is dystopian, though not as thoroughgoing as 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale. There are still political prizes to attain, there is still power to exert, and the citizens still have some say in how that happens. This provides a fascinating foundation for the novel's plot, a plot that is only enhanced by Gallagher's decision...