The 2023 Novel That Best Captures the Dystopian Nightmare We're Living In

"A device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought"

[Spoilers follow for the first half of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store].

Ever since I read it last winter, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a particular moment in James McBride’s National Book Award-winning 2023 novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. If you haven’t read it, it’s set in the early twentieth century and is centered on a Pennsylvania store / theater managed by a Jewish man named Moshe and his wife Chona, a woman who is beloved by the neighborhood’s African-American community. Doc Roberts, a local physician who had asked Chona out in high school and been rejected, joins the KKK and commits a horrific act of violence that leaves her fatally injured.

In her final moments, the book does something a bit unusual. It gives her a vision of the future, America’s future, in which the narrow scope of the story recedes and the author delivers a furious indictment of this current moment. It’s possibly the angriest moment of the book, and the most unsettling. Unsettling because I fear that everything he says here is true.

“The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from distant lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly … toward a common destiny, all of them … into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.

Had the group of stragglers moping down the hallway seen that future, they would have all turned en masse and rushed from the hospital out into the open air and collapsed onto the lawn and sobbed like children.”

Like McBride, like Ray Bradbury before him, it’s hard not to be angry about what this country has become. The National Center for Education Statistics informs us that the percentage of children who read for pleasure has dropped from 35 percent (in 1984) to 27 percent (in 2012) to 14 percent (in 2023). Smartphones and social media would have abolished the act of reading even if ChatGPT hadn’t done it. With our tech and our amusements and our constant demand for progress, progress, progress at any cost, we have succeeded in creating a nation divorced from all literature and history, a nation of the eternal present. Having chosen not to read, we are increasingly unable to read - or to think. We are losing the ability for abstract thought and interior awareness that’s defined humanity since the invention of the printing press. We haven’t progressed; we’ve regressed.

It worries me as an author, but also as a human being. When I walk through the terminals of airports I see row after row, people of every age, gazing at their screens. Parents, babies. They have the look of addicts. When Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1952, his vision of a dystopian future was one in which every house had three or four large televisions. His nightmare seems almost charmingly quaint now. No one would have guessed, then, that we would carry our televisions with us; that every person would possess an infinite entertainment device; that companies worth billions would create machines that do your writing and thinking for you. The most unnerving thing that I keep hearing from teachers - and I hear this consistently, from nearly everyone who works in public education - is that their students are no longer motivated to learn anything. It’s not that they display a lack of interest in the subjects under discussion - it’s worse. One teacher writes, “My kids don’t think anymore. They don’t have interests. Literally, when I ask them what they’re interested in, so many of them can’t name anything for me. Even my smartest kids insist that ChatGPT is good ‘when used correctly.’ I ask them, ‘How does one use it correctly then?’ They can’t answer the question. They don’t have original thoughts. They just parrot back what they’ve heard in TikToks.”

I don’t think this is sustainable indefinitely. Aldous Huxley warned that “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think,” and perhaps this is naive but I have to believe that eventually a significant number of us will realize that our oppression is being fed to us through chatbots and TikTok. Ted Gioia thinks there is coming a backlash against technology the likes of which we haven’t seen in two hundred years, and I hope he’s correct, because if not, it’s hard to see how we’re not doomed.