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The hotly tipped American novelist’s vision of a society stripped of empathy is lucid and horrific
As well as novels, Jesse Ball – who appeared on the Granta list of best young American novelists in 2017 – has also published books of poetry and short stories, with his spare writing style compared to Borges and Italo Calvino. His new novel offers four windows on to a dystopian society, where, within a dying natural world, citizens are divided into a ruling class of “pats” and an underclass called “quads”. The latter were refugees, granted asylum but systematically dehumanised – branded, mutilated and walled off in lawless quadrants. Order is maintained by unquestioned, institutionalised violence; all pats have gas masks and can set off cylinders of gas to kill defenceless quads.
Ball richly imagines a society where empathy is eroded at every level – a condemnation of the by-design inequalities of wealth, justice, freedom and opportunity that underpin western societies. Continue reading...