They turned 17 or 18 in 2000 in the dying town of New Canaan, Ohio, and watched the twin towers fall live on TV. Those were their high school years: friendships, rivalries, hook-ups, keg parties, football glory. The usual teenage wasteland. Then they scattered. Some went to college. Some went overseas. Others enlisted and shipped off to Iraq or Afghanistan, fleeing a country that had nothing left to offer them—especially if you came from the working or middle class. In the rust belt Ohio where industry fled decades ago, only empty factories and deep bitterness remained.
A decade later, four of them return to their hometown on the same night, without coordinating. Each has an appointment with the past. Each carries an old love lodged in their heart like shrapnel. During one dark, stormy night, their paths will cross and their teenage years will resurface. An ugly episode will emerge, along with the old rumor of "the murder that never happened."
Bill Ashcraft, leftist activist and junkie, has a mysterious package to deliver. He seems completely burned out, but still keeps an old class photo in his pocket—him with his two best friends, one dead in combat, the other from an overdose. Stacey Moore, PhD candidate in Chicago, needs to meet her ex-girlfriend's mother, who treated her like dirt back then, but wants help finding her daughter who's been off the grid for years. Dan Eaton, Iraq and Afghanistan vet, the nice guy beaten to hell, has a date with his high school sweetheart—the one he abandoned for the army. And Tina Ross is also tracking down an old flame.
This debut novel is a major work about contemporary America—pre-Trump, but already showing the fractures tearing American society apart. It reveals a country where the American Dream is dead and buried, with nothing much left to offer its children, especially those from working and middle-class backgrounds. In this rust belt Ohio, industry abandoned them long ago, leaving only derelict ruins and mountains of resentment.
By alternating timelines and giving voice to multiple narrators, Stephen Markley transcends genre boundaries, showing every facet of a story that's both about contemporary American society and a group of teenagers with toxic relationships. He shows brilliantly how this country loses itself in fantasies of a grand, admirable America that no longer exists.
This could be a simple four-panel fresco and it would already be magnificently dark, but the extremely brilliant construction—through the return of these four young adults to their past—reveals something truly sordid, and the novel transforms into a relentless thriller. This story is a kind of American counterpart to Nicolas Mathieu's "Leurs enfants après eux," but far more political because the author is brutally critical of the federal government, particularly regarding the wars America launched for not-always-honest reasons.
This is supreme artistry. A novel of blood and tears that hits hard.
Translated from English (United States) by Charles Recoursé. Albin Michel, 2025. 560 pages.