How the Rest of the World Sees America (Through the Eyes of Its Writers)

Madeleine Schwartz Recommends Bruna Dantas Lobato, Uwem Akpan, Maeve Brennan, and More

I’ve spent much of my career reporting outside the United States, but in recent years, many of my interviews have ended the same way: with questions to me about what is happening at home. The world is watching the changing politics in the United States carefully, out of fear, out of desperation and in some cases out of a sense of regret that the US has not learned from its peers abroad.

The vast literature of writing about the US from journalists and novelists abroad often returns to the same themes, consumerism, brokenness and cruelty. While we at The Dial were putting together our essay collection, How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, we found that many of our writers described the country as a strange mix of consumerist conquest and confused idealism.

“American tourists still feel to me like a liberation army that got stuck in its pattern of conquering and inventorying and now, almost a century in, has grown cumbersome, bloated, unhelpful,” writes Francesco Pacifico in his essay from Rome. I was reminded of the French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s own take on the American approach to consumerism. “The microwave, the waste disposal, the orgasmic elasticity of the carpets: this soft, resort-style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world.”

Works about the US from abroad often have mythic status at home. Chinese politburo member Wang Huning’s book America against America fetches sales prices in the thousands and informs Chinese policy. (One of his insights: “If you want to overwhelm the Americans, you must do one thing: surpass them in science and technology.”)

But they might also inform us on the 250th anniversary of our country. Along with Dial colleagues, I’ve put together a little list to get you started.

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Bruna Dantas Lobato, Blue Light Hours 

Bruna Dantas Lobato’s novel follows a young Brazilian woman as she struggles to describe her new life as an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in Vermont to her mother back home. Four thousand miles apart, they connect through the blue glow of their computers, ask each other about their lives and invent new rituals to stay close. It’s a tender coming of age story that explores what it means to try to make a new home, against the all-American backdrop of the university campus.

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends

This slim volume by Valeria Luiselli is based on her experiences working as an interpreter for Central American migrant children who risked their lives to reach the United States. As part of the bureaucratic process that will determine whether or not they can stay, they must answer 40 deceptively simple questions, ranging from the matter-of-fact “why did you come to the United States” to the more difficult “Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared or hurt you?” Luiselli, who was born in Mexico and now lives in New York, writes movingly about these children facing deportation and highlights the gap between America’s ideals and the racism and cruelty that pervades its treatment of undocumented children.

Uwem Akpan, New York My Village

Is this the great New York bedbug novel? Uwem Akpan tells the story of a Nigerian editor who travels to the publishing epicenter of the US for a prestigious fellowship only to encounter the harsh realities of living in a cosmopolitan place. I’ve recommended Akpan’s book to countless people for its satiric look at US publishing, immigration and New York City itself.

Javier Cercas, The Speed of Light

This book is a recommendation from our translator Lily Meyer (herself a wonderful writer). It’s the 1980s and a young Spanish writer accepts a position at a Midwestern university. When he arrives he’s greeted by a Vietnam War veteran who will be his office mate and who the department treats as an outcast. The book follows their relationship over the course of two decades. “It’s a terrific and under-read book,” Meyer told us.

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Maeve Brennan, The Long Winded Lady

From 1954 to 1981, the Irish writer Maeve Brennan penned short, gossipy sketches for The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section. She was the first to do so, and chronicled life in the city by people-watching and sitting in half-empty restaurants, eavesdropping. Her hyper-specific pieces tell the story of navigating New York as an outsider, a writer and a woman, and are a reminder of how many seemingly insignificant moments of joy, cruelty and vulnerability we brush up against every day.

Oscar Martinez and Juan Martinez, The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of An MS-13 Hitman (Tr. Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington)

So much of what the United States likes to think of as an “immigration” problem is one of its own making. In this book, Oscar Martinez, one of El Salvador’s greatest journalists, and anthropologist Juan Martinez look at the US-created MS-13 gang and how it has shaped politics across Central America.

Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death

The funeral industry is playing a “huge, macabre and expensive practical joke” on the American people, Jessica Mitford declares at the beginning of The American Way of Death. Originally from the United Kingdom, Mitford is shocked by what she finds when she moves to the United States. Her expose of the industry’s many exploitations is also an examination of life and death in American culture.

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (Tr. Edmund F.N. Jephcott)

Perhaps no one has ever been less suited to California than Theodor Adorno, a man with limitless contempt for Hollywood, popular music and advertising. While living in Los Angeles, in exile from Nazi Germany, he started writing Minima Moralia, a collection of “essays and aphorisms” that find the seeds of fascism in American culture, even as the United States was fighting fascism abroad.

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Madeleine Schwartz is the editor-in-chief of The Dial.