The Harder They Come Fiction. By T. CoraghessanBoyle. New York: Echo, 2015. Pp. 400. $27.99.

Abstract

Kim Davis's cultural import has less to do with gay civil rights than with the American ideal that individual freedom is guaranteed by the Constitution. Davis characterizes both the urgency of this belief and the caprice of its application—traits also seen across the sovereign citizen movement. Sovereigns insist on this same ideal of law as personally just; their often elaborate interpretations of legal history or protocols for encounters with police officers or courts act as support for their claim to knowledge of authentic—as opposed to corrupted—law. In this novel, Boyle gives voice to sovereign theory (its conspiracy theories about the Fourteenth Amendments, its nostalgia for a simpler time and tax code, and its radical reduction of legal realities down to, for instance, whether a citizen has entered into a contract with a police officer). Set in Ukiah, California, the location of Jim Jones's first stab at utopia, The Harder They Come follows a sovereign farrier, Sara, and her lover, Adam, a modern mountain man who models himself off of freemen of the mythical western past and who hopes the opium poppies he has planted in the woods will “make him independent and never have to say Yessir, Cap'n, to no man.” He sleeps outside, eats dinner naked: he's physically tough, the sort of guy who sneers at SWAT teams and flicks off the security cams in the cabins he raids for alcohol and supplies. While these characters veer into the cartoonish, between Adam's hyper-masculine madness and Sara's pamphlet-like spouting of opinions on the gold standard and license plates, the novel nonetheless offers students something of the human complexities and stakes in the sovereign movement and how sovereign ideology links to our wider cultural moment.