Author's vivid novel tells story of America gone wrong

The abandoned Packard car plant in Detroit, a city that used to be great, says Benjamin Markovits. Photo / AP

In Benjamin Markovits’ vivid new novel, the city becomes a symptom of America gone wrong. He tells Mick Brown about losing out and fitting in.

"The world," Benjamin Markovits says, "makes something of us and decides to a certain extent what we're like - and I've always hated that. The world isn't very good at making these decisions, and yet the older you get, the more decisions about you it makes. The less successful you are in worldly terms, the more you become conscious of the gap between who you think you are and the world's assessment. And that gap seems peculiarly suited to the novel, because I can't think of any other art form that allows such unfettered access to pure consciousness - what it's like to be inside somebody's head."

As a novelist, Markovits has always felt drawn to people "who don't feel perfectly represented by their place in life". Maybe, he adds, "because I was always an outsider".

Markovits, 42, is tall - 1.9m - and rangy, with gentle eyes, a high, domed forehead and a cadaverous expression. He talks in a quick-fire manner and attacks his cooked breakfast in the North London cafe where we meet as if he is refuelling.

He has run 8km that morning on Hampstead Heath - something he does four or five times a week.

The son of two law professors - an American Jewish father and a German Christian mother - Markovits was born in California, grew up "slightly oddball" in Texas, and spent time at schools in England and Germany. He is also a former professional basketball player - one of the few, perhaps, who would name John Betjeman as a favourite poet. He now lives in London with his English wife and two children. So where exactly, he wonders aloud, does he fit in?

"I never quite figured it out."

Fitting in is the central theme of Markovits's new novel - his seventh. You Don't Have To Live Like This tells the story of Greg Marnier - "Marny" to his friends - listless, directionless and in his early 30s, who has fallen from a promising future at Yale to a thankless teaching job in Aberystwyth, and is persuaded by an old classmate, Robert James, to join in a scheme to settle in and save a burnt-out neighbourhood in Detroit.

James is a dot-com millionaire, whose good looks and preppy outfits lend him the appearance of "the kind of guy a woman could trust to pay for their kids' private schooling", and whose ambitions are a hazy combination of altruism and self-advancement.

Joining a pioneering group of middle-class liberal idealists, left-wing counterculturists and Tea Party libertarians, all united in a vision of building a meaningful future, Marny moves into an abandoned home, takes a job as a supply teacher, begins a relationship with a black woman, Gloria - and buys himself a gun.

Markovits' interest in Detroit was piqued by newspaper articles on the city's decline and plummeting house prices. "You heard about houses selling for 300 bucks, and I had this idea that if you could get a bunch of friends to move there that would be an interesting thing to do. Then it struck me as not a bad idea to write about - probably better to write about it than to do it."

Detroit, he says, is a symptom of much that has gone wrong with America.

"The failure of the unions, the death of manufacturing, white flight from the cities - it's all happened in Detroit. It has a beautiful downtown, and all the other remnants of a great city: four ballparks, a great museum, and these wonderful residential neighbourhoods - and yet in parts it feels rural, with all these empty streets where people have left. You have to wonder, what does that feel like? You're on a block, and a neighbour moves out; then two doors down the same thing happens, and nobody's buying in - this slow, terrifying process of the city emptying out. At what point do you bail out yourself?"

You Don't Have To Live Like This is a very smart book, with vividly drawn characters and densely woven themes - the tensions put on old friendships by contrasting degrees of achievement and unresolved love affairs, the murky connections between politics and business, the difficulty of making the right choices and the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

But at its heart is the vexatious question of race, and the tensions that arise between residents and incomers - an inversion of Detroit's history of "white flight" and black arrival. "If white people want to move in, they can move in," as one black character puts it. "See how they like it."

Benjamin Markovits. Photo / Supplied

The uneasy peace is fractured when a young (black) man on a bike steals a mobile phone and is hit by a (white) motorist as he tries to make his escape. Was the motorist swerving to avoid the boy - or to hit him?

The case quickly develops from a local event into a national talking point, drawing all the book's major characters into a tangled web of opinions and allegiances. It is a catalyst that calls to mind Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire Of The Vanities: one wrong turn off the freeway. Or, as Markovits puts it: "I wanted something where you take essentially simple events but which in their sequence become so f***ed up you can't really tell how you got from point A to point B."

In Marny, Markovits says he wanted to shape a character who, while not racist, was "a little off" in his attitudes to race. Marny's love affair with Gloria is a tentative dance of attraction and misunderstanding. "You've got the most amazing skin I've ever seen on a human being," he blurts out on meeting her for the first time. "Do people say that to you?"
"White men," she replies coolly. "Usually they put it a little different."

You Don't Have To Live Like This was written before the police shooting events in Ferguson and Baltimore - events that the climax of the book anticipates.

Nonetheless, Markovits says, "America is doing a lot better than when I was a kid. You see many more race-neutral interactions in the media, in life - at least in middle-class life - than you did."

And then there is Obama, of course - a symbol of racial progress, but equally of racial bigotry. "In some ways, it was predictable that as soon as you get a black president you license a suppressed racism in the culture, because everyone's allowed to complain about the president," he says. "And that's certainly what's happened."

Markovits worked as a volunteer for Obama's presidential campaign in 2008, and the president makes an appearance in the book at a fundraiser, rustling up an impromptu game of basketball - and accidentally elbowing Marny in the face.

"I never played basketball with Obama," Markovits says with a laugh. "I'd love to - but he never asked me."

You Don't Have to Live Like This (Faber & Faber $32.99) is out now.

- Canvas, Telegraph