THE LOCALS is an excellent novel about the struggles of contemporary America: rising inequality, the decline of the working class decline, and more. It's not a cheery story, but it is a gripping examination of contemporary (and small-town) life in America. Dee's prose is excellent, and if you're familiar with his other novels I'm sure you'll know what to expect: A well-told, engaging story, populated by interesting and three-dimensional characters.

Recommended, as all of his novels are.

I had this book on my "to read" list for so long and decided to finally read it after a friend suggested it. What was I waiting for?!? This book was great! I was a bit concerned after reading the first chapter or so, but the storyline quickly captured my attention and I was hooked

not just a tiresome and often painfully dull plot but vastly underwhelming prose, this novel has little to praise outside of the ardent forgettableness of it

a perfect read for 2017. Small town details and family dysfunction aptly written.

This was a strangely disconcerting read as I found much to puzzle and irritate me but also much to enjoy, and it’s difficult to write an objective review as I really liked the book, found it a compelling page-turner and an engaging and often thought-provoking exploration of contemporary American life. But at the same time I found some inconsistencies and infelicities that should surely have been ironed out at the editing stage. (Was it in fact edited to any great degree?). Set in the Berkshires in the small town of Howland, Massachusetts, it’s essentially a portrait of a town in decline. At the centre are the two key characters, Mark Firth, an ambitious building contractor, and Philip Hadi, an immensely wealthy hedge-fund manager who relocates to the town, finding it offers a safer way of life than New York City after 9/11, and soon puts himself forward as a sort of benevolent dictator. The way he acts – dispensing philanthropy but deciding undemocratically what happens in the town – raises many pertinent questions about government, democracy, paternalism and so on, but none of these issues seem to get resolved. The book jumps about a lot and some characters seem to be introduced for no good purpose. The prime example of this comes in the first chapter, which almost stands as a short story complete in itself, when we meet a man who needs to see his lawyer after being conned out of a lot of money and meets Mark who is on the same errand. But after this prologue he disappears and is in no way integral to the unfolding narrative. As a domestic drama, however, the book works very well and I found Dee’s powers of social observation insightful and empathetic. But then he doesn’t seem to know how to end the novel and the last chapter which focusses on Mark’s daughter seems to belong to another book altogether. When I’d finished I went back and re-read Dee’s earlier book The Privileges and as I suspected it threw into sharp contrast this latest novel, being a cohesive, well-structured book with a clear narrative arc and no superfluous people or events. A much better book all round. So ultimately I was disappointed and somewhat irritated by The Locals as I felt it could have been so much better. That said, I actually found it a really good read – a paradox indeed.

This is a very tough one to review. It kicked off with a bang with a gripping prologue narrated by a contemptible, almost sociopathic con-man in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in New York City. The story then segues into the setting of small town Howland, Massachusetts, where local residents find themselves in a sort of class/political warfare with each other. There are plenty of characters and Dee fleshes them out beautifully - all fully human, flawed and selfish in their own unique way. The most interesting character to me was the billionaire Philip Hadi, who moves his unwilling family to the quaint and charming town of Howland in the aftermath of 9/11. Hadi and his wife, Rachel, are the only characters I thought Dee left blank. I didn't get them at all - they never felt real or substantial and I could not get a handle on Hadi's real motivation for anything he did.

The story meanders along through the years, with character arcs melding into each other mid-chapter, as if Dee were taking just an aimless walk around town. The story just ends with no real denouement.

It's just weird - started as a 4, and ended up a 3. The writing and the characters are first rate but after a while, it was a real effort to pick up for me because I just didn't care anymore. I suspect I am probably not bright or savvy enough to grasp the deep, meaningful political warning Dee is imparting here - my loss, I guess.

Sincere thanks to Netgalley and Random House for an ARC of this novel.

When a billionaire is elected mayor of a small New England town, truth might just masquerade as fiction.

An immersive character-driven novel that hits all the right notes at this point in the American story.

Eh, just really didn't go it for me. I never quite clicked with any of the characters and therefore had no investment in what became of them.

The aftereffects of 9-11 on a small town are investigated in this novel that used a panoramic point of view.

DNF @15%

I really tried to get into this book, but I couldn't grasp the plot or the character's motivation. There was a long of swearing and I was overall just bored with the content that the first couple of chapters were producing. I wish that this would have been a better hit for me, but I just wasn't all that into it. I'm still very grateful for the chance that NetGalley gave me!

“There was no earthly specimen more out of touch with reality than a New Yorker. People who lived on an island and paid a million dollars for a bedroom.”

The Locals from Jonathan Dee is a remarkable novel which captures American life in the decade following 9-11: the shock, the aftermath, economic stagnation, the real estate boom and subsequent bust. All of this is seen through a handful of characters who live in Howland, a town in the Southern Berkshires of Massachusetts. Regular readers know that I groan at appearances of 9-11 in novels, but here, in The Locals, Jonathan Dee hits just the right note.

The novel begins on 9-11 with a rather nasty narrator, a lab worker, who subsequently drops out of the novel. He’s on his way to see a lawyer to seek recompense from an investor who fleeced him of over 200K. Also in New York that day is contractor Mark Firth, who has traveled from Howland to see the same lawyer, for the same reason. This early section sets the scene for the stratification, the money and class divides–of American society–a theme that lies at the heart of the novel.

the locals

Mark Firth returns home to Howland, only to find that he’s welcomed like a surviving hero. And this is one of the things I loved about this novel-the way Dee captures the 9-11 feeling in the country. For a brief moment, everyone in the country seemed to come together in collective grief.

Everybody was all frightened, but really that was just a way of trying to make the whole thing more about themselves, which it wasn’t. Either you were actually there when it happened or it was something you watched on TV, period. But whenever something major happens it’s like everybody wants their little piece of the suffering. People had no idea what was coming next. That’s true I guess–when something as fucked up as that happens, something you weren’t even imagining, it wakes up your imagination pretty good–but still, they were just overdoing it, I’m sorry. Get over yourselves. You weren’t there, it didn’t happen to you .

Mark returns home to face a bleak future. Contracting work has dried up, and as for getting his stolen money back, there’s not much hope of that. Mark’s wife Karen, who hasn’t forgiven him for losing all their savings to a con man, temporarily puts her grievances on hold in light of 9-11, and, as she sees it, her husband’s close call with terrorism.

When billionaire Philip Hadi decides to make his summer Howland home his permanent residence, things begin to improve for Mark. Hadi, who has left New York following 9-11, is obsessed with making his house ‘safe.’ He hires Mark for various security jobs, and then settles into the town taking up local politics. After a comment from Hadi, Mark decides to stop building and improving houses, and instead begins picking up houses at auction and then flipping them for profit. He’s joined in this venture by his brother Gerry.

Most of the novel is concerned with Mark’s family and that includes his aging parents who haven’t saved enough for retirement, Mark’s single sister, vice principal Candace, and Mark’s brother, Gerry, whose work at a real estate company comes to an abrupt end following a corrosive affair with a married coworker.

Hadi’s presence in town begins to sharply divide residents. Hadi, who takes up political office, begins to suck up the town’s deficit , but that comes at a cost, and Gerry in particular, who has extreme libertarian views, sees Hadi’s generosity as what it is–a benevolent dictatorship. Using the anonymity of his blog, Gerry tries to flail citizens into action, but most people are far too happy taking Hadi’s handouts to complain or question Hadi’s decisions.

As the plot continues, Mark’s daughter, Haley, who serves as the battleground for her parents’ toxic marriage, grows up in a new America–an America in which the one-percent live in their own stratosphere while city budgets face shortfalls, small businesses fold, libraries close and homes across America fall into foreclosure at unprecedented rates. Howland has its year-round residents, the locals, who, in many cases, depend on income from the wealthy second home residents. Some of the businesses that spring up for the wealthy are totally inaccessible to the average local: the phenomenally expensive yoga retreat centre that’s booked up for almost a year in advance:

Rich people who led lives full of manufactured stress. Women who worked harder than they needed to, or women who didn’t work at all. Their hyper-refined problems expanded to fill the shape of expensive solutions.

Or the pretentious destination restaurant that serves 16 or 17 course meals, so expensive that the locals who can scrape up the money can come for a “special occasion.” Diners are given a booklet and a “small pencil, in case they want to record, for memory’s sake any details or impressions.”

Mark Firth tries to rise in American society in the shadow of Hadi, and we see Hadi, a man who has no emotional investment in the community, try to transform Howland into a personal fiefdom. In spite of the fact that Hadi is a prominent figure in the plot, his motives remain cloudy. The wealth he drops into Howland improves life, but there’s a cost that some of the locals are unwilling to pay. Hadi states that “democracy doesn’t really work anymore,” and then consciously or unconsciously proves he’s right. The novel takes the town of Howland as its crucible and asks some important moral questions about the sustainability and future of American society. This is a story that begins in collective grief, purpose and cooperation and ends in divisiveness and an unsettling, uncertain future

Review copy.

The author effortlessly gives the reader a narrative of life in a small town. Howland, Massachusetts feels like a genuine community. Dee’s characterization of the ‘locals’ reveals the flaws of human nature. No matter the temperament however, each character is richly drawn; I just wish there weren’t so many as it was confusing at times. The tone is generally not a happy one but there is an undercurrent of hope. In the end, I felt good about my time spent with the ‘locals’. Overall, a story that raises questions and is a good read.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34002261-the-locals?from_search=true

What a beautiful, detailed, look at the lives of a small Massachusetts town and how the people are impacted by the emotional and economic aftermath of 9-11! I loved how Mr. Dee had the story line move from person to person in an almost fluid manner. The reader would be following Character A who would then interact with Character B. From there the reader would follow Character B, etc. This treatment helped emphasis the small town feel of Howland and how actions were all interconnected in this story that covered almost a decade of time. Perhaps the only thing that disturbed me was a gap of time near the end of the book. I felt like I had missed 10 pages where something was explained. I was able to fill in the gap through context but wondered why the author did not include it in the story as I felt it was important to the overlying arc of the book. But that mild irritation was easily balanced out by the rest of the book which was interesting and well-written.

Like John Lanchester’s post-crisis, state-of-the-nation epic Capital, Dee’s latest is a generous slice of cultural and financial pie. Money, manhood, class, domiciles and democracy are the central pillars of a long, fully-populated social sweep that starts on 9/11 in New York City but then swiftly and permanently decamps to Howland, a small Massachusetts town in the Berkshires.

Hopping from character to character like a flea, Dee illuminates a community – school teachers, postmasters, selectmen, teenage vandals, entrepreneurs, diner owners, policemen – over an extended period of years as they respond to the arrival among them of a member of New York’s 1%. Philip Hadi, some kind of Wall Street money man, relocates his family to his holiday home in sleepy Howland after the terrorist attack and thereby sets in motion a seismic political shift.

Hadi is a blank slate of a character, more of a motivating force than a personality, but through him Dee marks the changes brought about by the post 9/11 mood and economy, notably the impact of outsize wealth on what had been the status quo, on personal ambition, venality, the Yankee spirit, and confused politics of early twentieth-century USA.

Howland votes Hadi into civic power as its First Selectman, happily forfeiting democracy for the sake of lower property taxes and ultimately higher property values. The citizens are happy for him to subsidize businesses and services out of his own pocket as part of a bargain that permits Hadi to take control of Howland as a kind of personal fiefdom. If Hadi wants surveillance cameras on Main Street and he’ll pay for them, then up they go, no discussion. After all, as Hadi remarks,’ Consensus really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

While examining power, incremental change, the not-so-new politics of wealth, the role of the working man (and, to a lesser degree, woman) and much more, Dee fills the reader’s sightline with the loosely interwoven lives of his broad cast of characters. Most centrally, there are the three generations of the Firths: four siblings, their ailing parents, and one child. Around them extend lovers, laborers, acquaintances and passersby, extending the network, crisscrossing and intersecting with others as existences blossom, crumble, split, survive or just fade out of focus. Men’s perspectives – often sour, sad, centre-less, confused or angry – predominate.

The sweep is neither Dickensian nor epic. Instead, Dee keeps things devotedly humdrum, dodging – after the opening chapter – anything resembling the high peaks of drama. Instead, by bleaching out the customary crescendos of fiction, he reaches for something less sensational, more tellingly quotidian. The result is a largely cliff-hanger-free agglomeration of interconnected existences reflective of the philosophies and dilemmas of one corner of a large nation in an evolutionary age.

This is an ambitious novel from a writer of reliable originality and intelligence. Dee’s mind is sharp and unsentimental; his wit is carefully contained. As a modern chronicler, his judgements are shrewd. The American character is given sympathy but not much quarter.

From the murky perspective of here and now – summer 2017 – it seems clear that the so-called greatest nation needs to keep a close eye on itself in the mirror while considering its legacies, values and truths. Dee does precisely that. He deserves to be read.

4 high stars! I've not loved all of Jonathan Dee's novels, but I sure like his sensibility as a writer and I love how it comes through in The Locals. Many may find that not much happens in this novel, but it really worked for me. Moving from 2001 to close to the present, Dee creates an ensemble of characters who live in Howland, Massachusetts. Together, the characters represent a political, economic and social tableau of the times. The story starts in Manhattan the day after 9/11, and then moves to Howland, moving through time as told from the perspective of a number of characters. Moving from one slice of time to another, from one character's perspective to another, I felt like I was seeing recognizable personal struggles cast in a familiar political and economic context. Howland was as much a character as the individuals who live there -- the small town's evolution over the decade plus depicted is of a piece with the current and political dynamics of the US. There is one particularly brilliant story thread about the effects of having a very wealthy Manhattanite take on a political position in the town. To me this is Dee's strength -- his characters are never divorced from their historical context, but they manage to remain multidimensional. I loved reading this one. It doesn't have the acerbic tone of Dee's other novels. This time round, he seems to care more for his characters than he did in, for example, The Privileges. This was not a flaw for me but may be one to other readers familiar with Dee's writing. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of reading this book! Jonathan Dee brings to jarring life the time period between Sept. 11, 2001 and the housing crash in 2008, depicting how these events and those leading up to it shaped life in a small New England town.

This book throws into sharp relief better than any other novel I've read so far the time period that led up to the social division our country is experiencing now. This includes the depiction of a Trump-like figure who swoops in to "save" the small town of Howland from itself by subsidizing public services, community events, and even homeowners and businesses out of his own pocket to cut taxes and create an illusory sense of wealth among the residents. When he jumps ship and moves back to the big city after the housing crash (running the town as an elected official was just a fun side project for him, an experiment he staged because "democracy doesn't work anymore"), he leaves the town and its inhabitants in anger and structural disarray. This doesn't end well for the citizens of Howland, who are loathe to reinstate tax burdens, and who take their anger and contempt out on one another in violent and perverse ways.

I will recommend this book to anyone who is asking "how did we get here?" as a country, as a people. The writing flows beautifully; there are a few character sketches particularly at the beginning that don't fully flesh out, but that was ok with me. The last paragraph is gorgeous, so evocative. Five stars!

THE LOCALS by Jonathan Dee attempts to explore the tensions between urban and rural dwellers, between middle class and the very wealthy. Mark Firth is a contractor who is barely getting by while living in the Berkshires near fictional Howland, Massachusetts. In the aftermath of September 11, he begins working for a hedge fund manager, Philip Hadi, who wants his former summer home made "secure" for year-round habitation. The characters in this book, including Mark's daughter Haley who grows up as the story progresses, were not very likeable. Perhaps that's in part explained by some of the descriptors used for this novel "infused with a sense of desperation and dread" (USA Today) and "captures the deeply ingrained resentment and disillusion" (Wall Street Journal). Timely and relevant? Perhaps, but not a happy, uplifting read although Booklist, Kirkus and Publishers Weekly all gave THE LOCALS starred reviews.

Well, I suppose the DNF (did not finish) in the title pretty much gives away what my thoughts were about this book. You all know how rare it is for me to give up on a book.

I keep wondering if maybe what I downloaded isn't even the right book. It has the same cover. It even has a character named Mark Firth who is a contractor in Massachusetts. But the page for the book on Barnes and Noble's website says this is a 400 page book - the book I downloaded is just 284 pages. I could understand a difference of a few pages but more than 100? And the book I downloaded opens in Manhattan the day after the 9/11 attacks, not in Massachusetts, with an unnamed first-person narrator who is an extremely unlikable character. By the time I got to the actual first chapter, I was no longer interested.

George Saunders (Lincoln In The Bardo) calls the book "bold" and "vital." Mary Karr (Lit) called it "moving." The New York Times reviewer, on the other hand, didn't love it. And I can't tell whether Ron Charles (The Washington Post) liked it or not. So I'm not saying don't read it. Although I might be saying borrow it from your library if you're interested. There's a good chance you won't want to have paid good money for it.