Empire City. Matt Gallagher. New York, NY: Atria Books, 2020.
A man who can become invisible. A woman who can fly away. An immigrant who can run at super speed. All victims of a shared traumatic experience in Tripoli. What veteran doesn’t wish they could become invisible at a party, when the questions from rubberneckers or partisans evoke painful memories? Who doesn’t sometimes want to fly away when they feel trapped in a crowded room, and the lizard brain in the back of the head starts looking for egress? When a veteran feels trapped in their own hometown, might they not wish they could run so far and so fast that they leave the world behind? The enduring power of Matt Gallagher’s triumph in Empire City is the message that the power of war is ultimately to trap the individual, and even superpowers cannot save us.
Gallagher’s book takes place in an alternate timeline to our own. The year is 2011. America “triumphed” in Vietnam after adopting an all-volunteer force in 1981, launching thirty years of endless war and naked imperialism. Gallagher’s setting is New York City, now named Empire City, half the New York of Gatsby, with a frenetic obsession with money and class and half the London of Sherlock Holmes, replete with language of empire come home and all of the anxiety and tension that comes with it. Gallagher consciously evokes Gatsby—one location is named Ash Valley, a head nod to the Valley of Ashes through which Gatsby drives. Examples of the language of conquered lands coming home and mixing with American vernacular also abound: police officers are babylons, Jamaican slang, and veterans and soldiers use a British/Australian racial slur for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean peoples.
Although Gallagher’s book is certainly a kind of war novel, it is in conversation with a much broader canon of American and imperial literature, from Gatsby and Augie March, to late Victorian British literature, and more.[1] The opening chapter of the novel has a cleverly placed picture of an elephant, and a character quoting Orwell.[2] Many of the characters, including a Navy SEAL who would be a caricature if there weren’t so many like him appearing on cable news, seems to channel the worst of the White Man’s Burden with none of Kipling’s irony.[3] Jean-Jaques, aka Dash, fills the role of Sherlock, navigating the urban jungle of downtrodden neighborhoods in New York filled with immigrants from the reaches of the new American empire, more comfortable among those elements than he is with the crowds of financiers and politicians, all as he attempts to unravel the mystery of the Mayday front, a group of veterans unhappy with how the government has treated them. In this world, veterans who are not deemed ready to reintegrate are sent to colonies where they are drugged and placated until they are deemed fit to return to society.
The novel tracks three main characters who were all gifted superpowers by means of a bomb dropped during a rescue mission and laced with chemicals from outer space. Sebastian, the captive who was the target of the rescue mission, can turn invisible for short amounts of time. Mia, a helicopter pilot, lost one of her legs in the explosion, but now can fly. Finally, Jean-Jaques was part of the assault force. He elected to stay in the military after the accident, and is now the third of three members of a squad of super-soldiers known as The Volunteers.
Sebastian, one of the three characters through whom we experience the story, comes from California, from nowhere, but went to school in the American south, and now roams New York City, full of hate and discontent for monied elites but unable to challenge them in any meaningful way other than snide comments, drinking wine, and smoking weed alone in his apartment. Like Nick Carraway, he judges, but almost never out loud.
Sebastian most reminds me of myself, although he did not serve. He ran into a war zone as a civilian, seeking a cousin who had gone missing. As a young man he was brash and arrogant, but the accident has left him snide and cynical. A self-styled public relations hack for the government, Sebastian is driven by a desire to find out what really happened in Tripoli, the site of the rescue. Is Tripoli a stand-in for Benghazi, and the attack on a consulate that left four Americans dead in 2011? Gallagher certainly seems to be reminding us that individuals with superpowers, or countries that are superpowers, are not immune from disaster.
The novel opens with an engagement party for Mia Tucker, an old-money East Coast scion who served as a helicopter pilot and now works in finance. Although her service has made her somewhat jaded, Mia doesn’t need much convincing to jump on board a Senate campaign for a retired two-star general running on a platform of national service. She finds out early in the story that she is pregnant.
Mia’s arc is one of the more heartbreaking. Political pressures, loyalties, and her own veteran identity constantly force her to choose between bad options, between ideals and practicalities that seem to only be practical when spoken by hawkish foreign policy centrists. Near the end of the novel, she will clash with Sebastian, sitting in a diner, in what, for me, was the climactic scene.
Finally, there is Jean-Jacques, whose first point-of-view chapter opens by asking, “What was memory and what was dream?”[4] Jean-Jacques’ family illegally immigrated from Haiti, and he served in part to gain citizenship. In his America, however, immigrant veterans are assessed when they leave the military and must pass a board before the government will grant citizenship. If they fail, the government deports them.
Jean-Jacques, however, is not trying to get out of the military. Far from it. He longs to stop being used for propaganda on the home front and to return to battle. Mia makes compromises based on belief and idealism. Jean-Jacques makes moral compromises so he can go back to doing the only thing he knows. As an audience, the novel forces us to question what about the empire is worth protecting, when our most moral character wishes nothing more than to leave the heart of what the empire represents.
Gallagher reminds us that the empire enslaves both its practitioners and its victims.
Despite their superpowers, the novel shows how all the characters are ultimately trapped. None of them can move with enough individualism or power to escape the powerful political and social forces of Empire City, the same way Orwell was powerless in India. Gallagher reminds us that the empire enslaves both its practitioners and its victims.
Matt Gallagher (Simon & Schuster)
I spoke with Gallagher shortly after I finished the book and we talked about why war stories still matter in 2020. Gallagher hopes his readers note the idiot punk blogger—referring to himself and his Kaboom! Blog days—still cares about the ongoing effects of war without end. He’s a civilian now, but he still cares, and civilians caring is how it is supposed to be in a republic. He said that all war literature is in some ways a howl into the void, a voice screaming into the dark that this matters.
This novel is a powerful addition to the American canon. A stunning, short-paragraphed powerhouse that is both eminently readable as a thriller but can also bear the weight of a deep, close reading of the symbolism, rich with interpretative possibility and bold style choices. Yes, what Gallagher is talking about still does matter.
Peter Lucier is a Marine veteran and a writer. He currently attends St. Louis University School of Law.
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Header Image: “Empire City” from the the game “Infamous” (Fandom/Infamous Wiki)
Notes:
[1] See: Joseph McLaughlin, Writing The Urban Jungle Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
[2] George Orwell and Jeremy Paxman, Shooting An Elephant London: Penguin Classics, 2009. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/shooting-an-elephant/
[3] http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_burden.htm
[4] Matt Gallagher, Empire City. 37.