“It hurts to say it, but we’re living in cruel and shallow times.” Thus, in a nutshell, this fluent catalogue of all the ways in which cruelty and shallowness have come to define our lives. Lewis, a scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, allows that his book is about a little of everything; among its topics are consumerism, Elon Musk, the attack on the Capitol, Donald Trump, homelessness, idiocracy, and, well, “sex robot brothels.” All are of a piece in explaining why, he goes on to say, America “often feels more like a woodchipper for the soul than a safe place to call home.” Blame it on “this strange red giant called Texas,” where so many of these things get their start or at least accumulate force: Lewis finds plenty of good in its people, yet little but toxicity in its politics. It all adds up to a “world of sick systems and faded dreams,” governed by a president, “American Caligula,” for whom “big” is the ultimate superlative: “It’s what dullards confuse with greatness.” Committed to a vision in which we’re all just a bit “smaller sweeter slower lighter,” the author looks to a few instances in which a bit of hope comes glimmering through the darkness: a blue-collar version of Burning Man, the latter of which has become a corporatized plaything for the very wealthy; the inherent goodness of ordinary people, who are “often quietly bitter about the way American life is structured by dislocation, competition, and corporate compunctions, not to mention the unavoidable triad of race, class, and gender.” Lewis can turn a memorable phrase with apparent ease, and these disparate pieces cohere nicely in the end. And more than recite all the manifold ills of America, he offers at least something of a program of resistance: “Pivot from despair to action. Avoid violence but otherwise forget the high road.”
