What We’re Reading: American Elsewhere

American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit Books, 2013)

American Elsewhere is an ambitious novel. The story follows a woman named Mona Bright, who inherits a house in the small, strange, hard-to-find-on-a-map town of Wink, New Mexico. Wink, it turns out, grew up around a high-powered research station that may or may not have gotten into some big, bad stuff (spoiler: it did). We experience this strange, prototypical 50s/60s-style town with Mona, but there are also narratives involving Mona’s mysterious mother, the roadhouse just outside of Wink, Mona’s own fraught relationship with her body and the daughter she almost had, and the odd residents of Wink (who keep dying—like you do).

And yet, bubbling away underneath all of that cool, semi-pulpy plot is a really serious question about how America thinks about its own history, specifically these “good old days” when every home looked like something out of Leave It To Beaver, every man had a car in the garage to work on, and every woman knew how to sew and make great lemonade. Today, we can recognize the huge problems of this vision and world (gender being one of the biggest and most troubling), but American Elsewhere asks us to examine not just how terrible Wink’s image of community and society might be; it also suggests we might still be guilty of romanticizing this version of small-town America—one that Bennett really nicely shows is constructed and contrived.

But how to show this 50s/60s America as problematic? Well, aliens turn out to be American Elsewhere’s approach. I won’t spoil the plot intricacies of how this plays out, but Bennett’s sprawling narrative uses aliens (the creepy, unknown, scary kind instead of the little, green humanoid kind) as a way to leverage this idea that the town Mona finds—the town that has perfectly manicured lawns, a friendly diner everyone attends, and folks just bein’ folks—is manufactured and maintained by a group of beings who saw what America wanted to be and are intent on and addicted to keeping that vision alive.

American Elsewhere is, at its core, a detective story. Mona, who used to be a cop, is putting together the pieces of this town, of her mother’s past, and of the murders that keep happening. And this leads to some very cool investigative moments, one of which is perhaps my favorite in the book. Mona has started to hunt around in the abandoned research station located on top/in a mesa, and she finds video of an experiment featuring the man in charge, Dr. Coburn, and, surprisingly, her mother.

Mona watches the film two more times. Then she starts to look at the records around her.

The reports don’t make any sense to her, and since she has no intention of staying here all night she drops them and moves on.

The tapes, though…the tapes and transcripts are worth something.

After about a half hour of gathering material, she starts playing a couple of the recordings and reading the files.

With a bit more arranging, they start to resemble a story.

This kicks off one of the best chunks of the book, featuring found documents, censored agency reports, and cryptic messages that foreshadow/historicize some bad stuff. This, I think, is where the book truly excels; Bennett is so good at letting the reader participate in the discovery process. The stuff about the aliens is foreshadowed early enough and heavily enough that its reveal is almost banal, but the major events that happened at the research station—the events that thrust everything in this book into motion—those take a more delicate approach to tease out, and it’s a process we get to enjoy.

American Elsewhere is big, complicated, and challenging. There are times when the story slows a little, but never for long, and never without a reason. As someone who lives in a small town that desperately tries, at times, to harken back to a place like Wink, this book was both a great read and a personal one.

What ambitious novels have you been reading recently?