BookBrowse Reviews The Resisters by Gish Jen

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Set in a dystopian American future, Gish Jen's The Resisters is a tragic but hopeful story of identity and class struggle.

Gish Jen's The Resisters depicts a future United States, dubbed AutoAmerica, where climate change and convenience culture have resulted in a waterlogged surveillance society. The lower Surplus class live in AutoHouses (or AutoHouseboats) and accumulate a kind of currency in the form of Living Points, which they earn from consuming the creations of the Netted, the producing upper class. All the while, the Surplus are subject to the watchful eye of Aunt Nettie, an ever-present version of the internet that doubles as a ruling power.

Like many other dystopian novels, The Resisters can be read as a cautionary tale. However, while the book has a lot to say about the general pitfalls of investing in a consumerist society, it more specifically demonstrates how the dream of class ascension in such a society is a cruel and complicated beast, and it does so through the most American of sports: baseball.

The story focuses on a Surplus girl named Gwen, whose extraordinary pitching ability gives her a chance to level up in life. (Though two of the main characters are young people, the book is written for an adult audience.) Much of the book's rising action is tied to the question of whether or not Gwen will use her baseball talent as a ticket to attend college, a privilege not normally afforded to the Surplus, and possibly eventually "Cross Over" to the Netted class.

The book is narrated by Gwen's father Grant, a former teacher who is racially categorized as "coppertoned." His wife Eleanor, a lawyer of mixed Caucasian and Asian descent with a history of advocating on behalf of Surplus citizens, has twice been invited to Cross Over but refused, thereby becoming a "resister." Dedicated as they are to solidarity with their fellow Surplus, Eleanor and Grant have mixed feelings about Gwen going to college and playing baseball for a Netted team, but they encourage her to explore her choices.

Gwen's burgeoning success in the sports world is complicated by her friendship with Ondi, another mixed-race Blasian (Afro-Asian) girl who has her own ambitions where baseball and higher education are concerned. It soon becomes clear that the opportunities afforded to Gwen come at a price, as does being female and Surplus in baseball, which in AutoAmerica is a coed sport but still largely male and Netted. Pressures to conform to Netted norms when in Netted settings are great, to the point that a skin lightening procedure called PermaDerm is available for coppertoned people who want to appear "angelfair," the white-equivalent designation that applies to most of the members of the Netted class.

Ondi, who lacks the social currency and stability Gwen's pitching skills bring her, appears to be more willing to conform to expectations at times, but also more prone to spontaneous acts of rebellion, which creates tension between the two. The plot points built around their struggles don't just draw obvious parallels to racism in American society in general, but also raise questions about how adequate and meaningful current diversity and inclusion initiatives really are, especially when they focus on giving just a few marginalized people opportunities and then fail to change the hostile environments those opportunities put them in.

The stressful, ultra-connected atmosphere of AutoAmerica is mercifully tempered by Eleanor and Grant's countercultural habits: They avoid the "mall truck" food that would earn them Living Points, opting to grow their own vegetables and do their own baking. They home-school Gwen and teach her classic literature and history, rather than leaving her in the Surplus school environment, which prioritizes consumption over education. Through details like these, along with the presence of baseball itself—which seems relatively quaint in AutoAmerica—Jen effectively blends nostalgia for a mythical American past with the anxiety of a consumerist country forever reaching for the future, creating a society with new quirks that nevertheless doesn't feel that dissimilar from our own.

At times, the book's world-building gets in the way of its plot development. Grant's narration can feel overwhelming as he fits tangents and backstory into the current timeline while dropping myriad product names (DeviceWatch, DisposaCloth, etc.). The names are there to illustrate a point about the ubiquity of branding, of course, but the flow of Gwen's story occasionally loses its momentum in her father's meandering references and exposition. However, this doesn't stop the novel from arcing naturally to a satisfying, if sobering, conclusion.

Much more than a cautionary tale, The Resisters feels like a generous space to sit with the sadder truths of our consumption-driven society. While it doesn't shy away from the specifics of how a system lacking in basic humanity hurts people (and some more than others), it also shows faith that the forces able to overcome (or at least resist) such a system exist.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in March 2020, and has been updated for the January 2021 edition. Click here to go to this issue.