What a talented writer! All of the plot threads, all of the character sketches, lead inexorably to the end. “The Locals” is a disturbing, difficult, but extraordinarily timely novel that deals with personal responsibility, and our ambivalent relationship with it. Dee places his believably complicated characters on a spectrum of self-awareness, that is at times extremely uncomfortable .

Dee paints a realistic and remarkably judgement-free picture of the consequences of destroying the governmental status quo, in order to remake it.

I am sorry, but I cannot review The Locals. It is not my cup of tea and I did not like nor finish it

Interesting but certainly not uplifting or encouraging novel of small town America. Dee has a sharp eye for how things have evolved in the last 16 years, Using 9/11 as a starting point, he explores how our attitudes toward each other have changed, along with the financial circumstances which have beset so many. THere's a large cast of characters here, some of whom only appear briefly, but they are all believable. Mark and Hadi are not as opposite as they might appear on the surface. At times this is an uncomfortable read and it's hard to categorize- some might go so far as to think there's satire. Well written and worth your time. Thanks to net galley for the ARC.

Dee provides a slice of life in a rural New England town after 9/11. The characters could be almost anyone. Much of the story shows the daily lives of the 3 of the Firth siblings, Mark, Candace, and Gerry doing normal things, having normal family squabbles, jealousies, responsibility to their aging parents, and insecurities. I didn't like the characters, but I didn't hate them either. I liked the book and the way it portrayed normal everyday life, the fears after 9/11, the politics of the small town, the turn down of the economy, etc. It gave me a feel for the period and what was happening in of small town America. Yet I felt these characters were rather sad and pessimistic. Most seemed they expected to lose, for life to beat them down again and again.

Thanks to the author and Random House Publishing Group through Netgalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Never have I read a book in which the perspective-shifting among characters was achieved as gracefully as it is in The Locals. Sometimes it took a paragraph or two for me to notice that the narration had been assumed by a different character. The setting shifted, too, from fictional Howland to thinly disguised but recognizable sites like 'Asana' (Kripalu) to real towns like Great Barrington. Some voices and places were more believable to me than others (I struggled with Haley in particular), and I found myself wanting a more dire fate to befall some of the unsavory characters. Overall, though, Dee's post-9/11 small town was well worth visiting.

Dee’s new novel has created a lot of buzz. Despite his impressive list of publications and accomplishments he had slid under my radar until now; thanks to Net Galley and Random House, I read it free and early in exchange for this honest review. It is available to the public Tuesday, August 8, and those that love strong, purposeful fiction should get it and read it.

The Locals is entertaining, and it also conveys a sharply driven message, one that is timely, as we see the middle classes wasting away in Western nations that were once strong and relatively democratic, the most affluent becoming richer, and tens of thousands of homeless living in cardboard shacks and tents beneath the freeways of otherwise-successful American cities.

The story starts with 9/11. Mark Firth is in Manhattan on business and is taken advantage of by a con artist. By contrast, Howland, the small (and fictional) town where he lives and in which our story is set, seems safer, and more benign. He breathes easier when he is home.

He isn’t the only one that feels that way.

Philip Hadi decides to leave the big city, and he hires Mark to fortify his summer home into a secure summer residence. From there things unfold, and Hadi takes on increasing amounts of responsibility and power in Howland.

The story is largely character driven, and I dare you to find a novel in which a large number of townspeople are better developed than these. At first, I think I know which are the better citizens of Howland and which are its pond scum, but as the story progresses—told in third person omniscient, with one noteworthy exception—the most lovable characters darken, while those that seem unredeemable at the outset show some vulnerability and decency. Even without the novel’s purpose, which is brainy and clever as hell, it would be a good read. I particularly credit male authors that can develop female characters with this kind of depth. You don’t see it often.

Ultimately, however, we are forced to examine, through the eyes of the people of Howland, the role of the super-rich. How much authority are we willing to cede in exchange for easy material benefit? Teachers that have questioned the authority given philanthropists that have a lot of dollars to throw around, but no background whatsoever in education, will particularly appreciate this story. Beyond all of this, it’s absorbing, entertaining, and in places it’s funny as hell.

Highly recommended to those that love strong fiction.

Author Jonathan Dee offers up a big, ambitious American novel firmly located in time and place, just outside of New York City in a rural small town in the Berkshires, on 9/11/01 through the financial crash of 2008. The small town will begin as a refuge from the hell of 9/11, an Eden in counterpoint for an experiment in governance (vs. the activities occurring in NY City) and end in another version of hell as the housing/ financial crisis wipes out the small town that never knew what hit it. It's a daring and dynamic concept for a novel and one that is difficult to achieve. Unfortunately, Dee doesn't quite pull it off, although his efforts are impressive. The opening piece is remarkable, both because the character is truly vile and the writing is riveting. Large sections of the book are equally so, as the townspeople are never soft and cuddly; they are accidents on the side of the road that you can't pull your eyes away from. The difficulty lies in wrapping up such a broad and wide-ranging tale and the author falters. Details remain hanging, lives unspooled are then abandoned. While that may be truthful, it is frustrating for the reader. All in all, the book is well worth the read. I received my copy from the publisher through Netgalley.

"The locals" by Jonathan Dee is truly an amazing read. Dee has highlighted so many of the issues that are important in today's world. The decline of the middle class, the rising gap between the lower and upper class, and the struggles of a small town that wants to survive and yet not change. are only a small sample of the issues that are displayed in the book. I felt the book was so insightful and thought-provoking that it would make for a great book club selection with many possibilities of discussion.

This my first book by Jonathan Dee and I was attracted to it because of the theme, greed and what it does to a people. We are introduced to Mark Firth through the eyes of someone who was utterly selfish and self-absorbed and who reveals Mark to be a genial, trusting and gullible guy looking for an easy way to make money.

Not since Jonathan Franzen's Corrections have I read a book about a family as unpleasant and disagreeable as this one. I came the closest to liking Gerry, Mark's brother. He seemed to be the thinker, wondering if "things right now were off their anchor, that the decline of people's belief in something showed up in the apparent willingness to believe anything."

I knew the story was about how ordinary people trapped by greed behaved badly but the delivery seemed a bit uneven and sometimes felt preachy. Hadi's ability and willingness to pour his money into the town's problems seemed more an allegory than a credible behavior. He said democracy is dead so solving problems with money was a reasonable remedy. Gerry starts an anonymous blog to protest these events and admits to himself that "Just because you write down your thoughts and hit Post doesn't make you Thomas Jefferson."

Gerry is the most inconsistent character and also the most interesting, alternating between being lazy and a having a conscience. At one point he agonizes, "I just want to mean something. To stand for something." This coming from a guy who consistently lied to his boss and had a sleazy affair with a married woman. Nevertheless, it's Gerry who notes "Nobody wants to look inside themselves for what's missing...they all want to act like victims. But your first obligation is to yourself, isn't it?" And about how Hadi became so powerful. "It's like you can't stop it. The control gets taken away from you, but not even by force, you let it happen, you give it to them gladly and then thank them. How do you wake people up?"

Gerry observes, "Nobody believes in heaven and hell anymore. So there's no check on rich people, powerful people, doing whatever the fuck they want to do to the rest of us. No check except what the rest of us do to resist them." Hadi wanted to pass an anti-tobacco law without putting it to a popular vote because. "Consensus isn't want it's cracked up to be. I think our results these last few years have borne that out, don't you? If you let everybody vote on everything, some really destructive compromises and half measures are going to come out of that."

I get Dee is saying but this was a bit heavy, even for me and I totally agree with him. It kind of strong-armed the narrative for me. I have a feeling that this is a book that my thoughts are going to return to long after I've finished reading it.

I am torn about whether to give this book a 4 or 5: I settled on 4 because I didn't "like" it as much as some of the books I give a 5-star rating, but it's still a very good book. There's a scene where some of the characters talk about a "progressive dinner," (referring to something that ends up not meeting the traditional definition), but it occurred to me that this book is also very much like a progressive dinner (but not). The perspective/narrator continually rotates from person to person, which was a little disconcerting at first, but once I got used to the technique, it was interesting. You don't have the usual disorientation of trying to remember who a particular character is, because they're usually someone involved in the same narrative transaction, so you're already thinking about them anyway. (Or maybe a better comparison is a relay race, where the narrative baton keeps getting passed.)

But I digress. This story of a small town in Massachusetts raises a lot of interesting questions about the tensions between the wealthy and the middle class, what the role of small-town government should be, and how the post 9/11 economy operated in places that in some sense were fairly far removed (although Dee insightfully created a tangential one: many people knew somebody who knew somebody or knew someone who was not in danger but felt very personally connected to 9/11). This book made me think as I was reading it, in a good but non-preachy way, and while I wasn't especially fond of the ending, overall, it was a top-notch book.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

THE LOCALS: A NOVEL
Jonathan Dee
Random House, 400 pages
★★★½

Recently a college sophomore admitted that she kept hearing the phrase “since 9/11,” but didn’t really understand what it meant. That’s no dig at her; she was two when the Twin Towers fell and the national (in)security state crystallized. But if you wanted to explain to someone her age how the world shifted overnight, Jonathan Dee’s The Locals would be a good start. It’s not a flawless novel, but it’s one of the first good looks at the George W. Bush era. It also manages to delve into social class, robber baron politics, and the erosion of the American Dream by letting internal dramas speak for themselves and resisting the temptation to moralize.

The Locals is bookended by 9/11 and the collapse of the housing bubble. It opens in New York City, where a visitor from Massachusetts, contractor Mark Frith, happens to be in town to meet with a lawyer heading a class action suit to help he and others recoup losses from an investment scam. That very day 9/11 occurred and Frith is bilked a second time by a cynical New Yorker who couldn’t care less about what happened in Lower Manhattan. This sets the stage for a novel that is about self-interest, self-conceit, and seeking shortcuts for financial, personal, and community well-being.

The novel shifts to the Berkshires town of Howland. For most people from outside the Bay State, the Berkshires are a playground for those of means who come to partake of Tanglewood, summer theater, the Kripalu yoga retreat, art museums, tea on the verandahs of old hotels, and dance performances at Jacob’s Pillow. Rich New Yorkers have long summered in places such as Egremont, Lenox, and Stockbridge. Howland is the other Berkshires, the one that makes the county the third poorest in the state. It’s a fading blue-collar town of greasy spoon diners, precarious small businesses, once elegant homes, and citizens who do what they need to get by. Mark lives there with his wife, Karen, and their daughter Haley. It’s also home to his brother Gerry, who has just lost his job as a real estate broker for sleeping with a co-worker; and sister Candace, about to walk away from her substitute-teaching job. We meet a full cast of locals and their collective problems and inequities make Howland seem like a working-class version of Peyton Place.

Hope comes to Howland in the form of billionaire hedge fund manager Phillip Hadi, who moves from post 9/11 New York City and adopts Howland as his own—literally his own. When the head of the town council dies, Hadi assumes his post and proceeds to slash taxes and to bankroll services with his own money. Is he a savior, or the Devil in a designer plaid shirt and khakis? Mark, who oversees the rehab of Hadi’s house, admires his employer and seeks his advice; Karen and Candace are more cautious, and Gerry sets up an anonymous blog to denounce the man who would be king. Most townspeople find it hard to resist low taxes and a guy willing to pick up the tab for everything.

The Locals wrestles with the question of tradition versus change. Karen works at Caldwell House, a former Gilded Age mansion turned into a house museum; and Candace lands at the town library, another relic, but one kept open with Hadi’s money. The book's characters are metaphors for 21st century tensions. Hadi is the outsider who may or may not have good ideas, Mark is the sunny optimist, Mark's occasional helper Barrett is the angry white working-class male, and Gerry the pessimist. The women wallow in the contradictions within varying middle positions. Candace is torn between her anger and her desire to help people, Karen between her admiration for elegance and the gnawing suspicion that she can only hope to visit it, and Haley with being a dutiful child and asking a teenager’s tough (and sometimes prescient) questions about why things must be as they are. Dee raises debates worth considering. Do we prefer democracy or benevolent dictatorship? Is the American Dream still attainable? Can we trust something that seems too good to be true? And there is my student’s question: How has America changed since 9/11?

Ultimately we must decide if The Locals is a cautionary tale or a description of how things work in contemporary America. I would caution readers not to get caught up in the effusive pre-release praise surrounding the novel. Dee is a good writer, but there are plodding passages in The Locals, too many incidental characters, and a sometimes-clunky arc that is slow to reveal what is essential and what's simply filler. Still, anyone who knows the Berkshires will applaud Dee’s chutzpah for revealing what lurks beneath the surface elegance.

Rob Weir

I am an introvert. I can be outgoing and talkative and friendly, but I know I am an introvert because being around a lot of people leaves me ready for a nap and a recharge, while an extrovert would be pumped.

I was in the middle of reading The Locals when I felt that drained feeling. The point of view kept jumping from person to person and there were too many voices and people for me to handle. I took a nap.

It was several days before I pushed myself to pick the book back up. I finished it in another day's reading.

The novel starts out strong with an abrasive con man. His victim is Mark, from a small town in the Berkshires, who lost his money in an investment scam. Mark is an 'easy mark', and loses his credit card to this grifter. The story follows Mark back home, introducing a whole village of characters, each struggling to make it.

A New York City hedge-fund manager moves his family into their summer cottage; 9-11 and 'inside information' has convinced him that the city is no longer safe. Philip Hadi likes his new town and assumes political and financial control, paying budgetary items out of pocket to keep taxes low and home values high.

When the town decides they can't allow Hadi to arbitrarily make laws, he feels unappreciated and up and leaves--taking his money with him. The town has to deal with the hard reality that they cannot cover the budget without raising taxes significantly. They realize that under Hadi they had been living in "a fool's paradise," and must reevaluate what is necessary. The new reality includes closing the library, creating new fees, and requiring citations quotas from police.

Characters thoughts reflect aspects of 21st-century thinking:

"Corruption was a fact of life, on the governmental level especially, and if you didn't find your own little way to make it work for you, then you'd be a victim of it."

"The nation was at war; the invisible nature of that war made it both harder and more important to be vigilant."

"He thought everybody on TV was full of shit--the pundits, the alarmists, the conspiracy theorists--but their very full-of-shittiness was like a confirmation of what he felt inside: that things right now were off their anchor, that the decline of people's belief in something showed up in their apparent willingness to believe anything."

"The best part [of the Internet] was feeling that you were anonymous out there but had an identity at the same time." "...and this internet was like some giant bathroom wall where you could just scrawl whatever hate you liked."

"Some people really come to life when they have an enemy."

"Rich people, he thought. The world shaped itself around their impulses."

I was perplexed and puzzled why I did not have any immediate thoughts about the book. The ending involves a teenager who flaunts the rules and finds empowerment in resistance. Perhaps I am just too dense for subtlety? Or am I confused by too many voices, too many opinions, that I am not sure of what the author is saying?

A Goodreads friend loved this novel, which inspired me to request it from NetGalley. (She is an extrovert.) I agree with her that there are no likable characters. Each is flawed and self-centered, discouraged and angry about missing that brass ring ticket to success and happiness. Well, that could describe quite a few people today.

Perhaps my problem with the book is I don't like who we have become and I don't like the options offered to us. At the end of The Locals, Allerton, the new selectman, realizes that "any sort of collective action was automatically suspect...because if it worked, then we wouldn't be in the mess we were now in."

Once upon a time, we believed in progress and the eternal upward arc into a better world, which now we condemn as the fallacy of fairy tale thinking. And I want to hold to that fairy tale of a possible Utopia, the Star Trek world, the Utopia for Realists. Dee's novel reflects what we have become, but I want to be inspired to consider what we may and can yet become.

So I return to the small and strange act of resistance at the end, a teenager who just wants to sleep in a historical home, and is told she may not. It took another night's sleep for me to wake up and think, yeah, that's it--the girl's seemingly small act of resistance is a metaphor, about reclaiming for all what is reserved for those who can pay for it.

I finally saw the light. But it is subtle, but it's there.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

This is the first book by Jonathan Dee that I've read. And well, it starts off with a cynical sense of humor that some people might not appreciate especially as it pertains to NYC 9/11. But I like cynical.

From there, the action moves to Howland, MA. Things calm down, but those little hints of cynicism stay. Everyone seems to be trying to figure out how to outsmart everyone else. Dee has the ability to really nail people and their motives. He shows how almost everyone has at least some asshole tendencies. They are also not the best or the brightest, and you can see in advance where some of them are going to end up. He also writes amazingly well. Even little descriptions like “the river looked like it was in as bad a mood as everyone else”.

The novel rolls along at a good clip, surprisingly, given how much of it involves character studies. This isn't a book of laugh out loud funny moments, but I found myself snickering repeatedly. In a weird sense, this book reminds me of Elizabeth Strout’s work. One character’s chapters rolls into another’s and thus, the plot moves forward. There are numerous characters, almost all the citizens of Howland seem to be represented one at a time.

As the plot moves along, the storyline delves into the political and social aspects of a small town. There is a lot of interesting commentary here. What happens when a political figure tries to impose his will on the town? What are the consequences of no tax increases? What stories does the town tell itself about its history?

My only disappointment was over the ending, as the book just seemed to stop. Not sure what kind of resolution I was looking for, as this book mirrors life in how it chugs along.

My thanks to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.

The Berkshires, in south western Massachusetts, is one of those places that New Yorkers flock to in the summer. There are lovely small towns like Stockbridge and Great Barrington, and the Tanglewood Music Festival draws large crowds. I was one of those New Yorkers in the seventies and eighties. I loved having a picnic on the lawn on a July 4th night when Leonard Bernstein conducted, and the program included West Side Story (He changed his mind at the last minute and played a newly composed piece instead, but that was okay). We didn't even care that it rained. We shared the canopy of a huge tree with another New York couple.

I, like many other New Yorkers, thought about what it would be like to live in the Berkshires, maybe not full time but all summer. I wondered what it was like to be a permanent resident of such a beautiful, bucolic, landscape. Jonathon Dee's new novel, <b>The Locals</b> plays out that fantasy with some funny anecdotes and, a bleak view of life in a town where rich people vacation and middle-class residents struggle to make ends meet and live a life that is fulfilling.

The setting is the fictional community of Howland, close to Stockbridge and Great Barrington. Mark Firth runs a contracting business of renovating and restoring houses in the area. One of his biggest clients is his neighbor, Philip Hadi. Hadi is a hedge fund millionaire who moves to his summer home full time after 9/11. Mark is hired to fit the home with the highest level of security. The house becomes Hadi's fortress.

When Mark is thinking about his brother Gerry, a real estate agent, the narrative switches to Gerry and his thoughts about the people he shows houses to and then his story is handed off to the next character. Gerry's sister Candace plays a pivotal role in the story as the daughter who checks in on their parents. She is very concerned about her mother's advancing dementia and her father's lack of patience and understanding. Neither Mark nor Gerry understands Candace's angst.

We never know what Hadi is thinking. He is the puppet master, using his money as the ultimate influence in the entire community. His largesse is secretive and not well known to everyone. Hadi becomes the autocratic symbol for what ails the USA, the losing end of being middle class, and the rising power of wealth on the political stage.

Hadi takes over as mayor and life in Howland becomes pleasant for most people until small cracks begin to appear. Not everyone is happy with everything all the time. The residents are pleased that their taxes haven't gone up. The tax rate went down.

Mark and Gerry decide they want to try their luck when real estate goes into the boom era, and their situation improves but as we all know, that was a bubble that indeed did burst.

<b>The Locals</b> is a well crafted, thoroughly thought out slice of American lIves in the twenty-first century. JD offers much to mull over and wonder where it is all taking us in the current perilous times of politics, money, and power. Was 9/11 the event that flipped us all into some different kind of society that is guiding us now to an era of autocracy combined with xenophobia, and protectionism

Thank you, Jonathan Dee, NetGalley, and Random House.

This is one of those books that grabs you at the beginning, starts out a solid five star, then slows down, disappoints and finishes a three. You're drawn into the lives of the local people of small town Howland, Massachusetts. Howland is a summer resort town where many families have a second vacation home. Enters the Firth family siblings. This is not a book about life post 9/11 as I initially thought when I read the description.

The book opens with the 9/11 event and a minor player in the story. Then enters Mark Firth who happens to be in NY on that particular day. Mark is visiting an attorney and is involved in a class action law suit against a man who swindled him out of his savings. I'm still not clear as to why the 9/11 event was selected as the opening of the book or the author chose to open with a minor character.

Each character and there are many, had a unique contribution to the story; Mark, Candace and Gerry Firth, Mark's wife Karen and their daughter Haley are the main contenders. The others enter and exit the side lines adding color and detail in support of the main characters. Each family member, none of whom I liked or respected, has different values and opinions. Mark had my alliance at the beginning of the book, my favorite part, but lost my support half way through. Philip Hadi, NY billionaire was the hero in the book for me, a selfless person doing all he could, paying it forward for the greater good.

I rated the book 3 stars for several reasons. 1. After keeping the reader intrigued with the drama of daily life, it bogs down with minor characters. 2. Though filled with fine details, the story went nowhere with a disappointing end. 3. The way that Dee decided to present the story, in long flowing paragraphs, page after page of text without chapters, breaks, or headings was difficult to follow and took some getting use to.

Bottom line, a good read that highlights the world we live in today and let's us peek into the lives of the haves and have nots. Thanks to both Netgalley and Random House for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I'm a fan of Jonathan Dee's books and his wonderful ability to develop interesting characters and stories. The trend continues with The Locals, a story about life in a small town and how the town and residents are impacted by a wide range of events. The story is told through alternating narrators and flows, literally in some case, from person to person. As with most books, some of the characters were likeable and others weren't, but their stories were all interesting, and I wanted to learn what happened to them.
The book had some challenges, for me, and one was the time frame. I believe it took place over a period of 7-8 years, but a new chapter would start and you could tell time had passed (ie Haley got her drivers license) but it wasn't clear exactly how much time elapsed and what ended up happening in the interim to some of whom I thought were primary characters. The first chapter was interesting, but I'm not really sure of its relationship to the rest of the book.
Overall, an interesting and compelling book. Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for making an advance reader copy available to me.

Do you remember the days after 9/11? As the years grow on from that terrible day in history, my memory of it becomes foggier and foggier. I was working as a freelance journalist at the time, but missed the call for freelancers to come into the local newspaper I was writing for that day. I do remember police being on buses that day and watching the images that night at my what would become my girlfriend of five year’s place that night. I remember being a bit more scared about the anthrax attacks, which remain unsolved to this day and seemed more creepy, but perhaps that’s just memory playing its tricks.

Jonathan Dee’s latest novel The Locals covers life in a small New England town from 9/11 onward to about 2009. It does a stellar job of capturing the mood of the nation at the time, but comes with one glaring defect or two that I’ll get to later. The story centers mostly around a building renovator and his family. The renovator happens to be in New York at the time of the attacks (prompting a prayer vigil in his small town for his safe return) who is there to launch a class-action lawsuit against a man who defrauded him out of his family’s savings account. Not long after, a wealthy New Yorker moves into the town, and gradually begins to assert his political control — in a move that seems warily prescient of the rise of Donald Trump.

There are other characters that populate the small town: the renovator, whose name is Mark, has a brother named Gerry who is trouble with a capital T. Both men get caught up in a property speculating business that grows with the economy (until the inevitable collapse in 2008, which shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler if you know your recent history). Mark’s sister, Candice, has been demoted from her vice-principal job at a local private school, which her niece Haley attends. Mark’s wife takes on a job at a local tourist attraction, which plays a pivotal role by novel’s end. All of these stories intertwine around the New Yorker’s power grab.

The novel plays with structure, though this move feels more style over substance. Recalling the ’90s independent movie Slacker, one section of the novel shifts from character to character as one takes his or her leave over the other and follows them. The first nine percent of the book (which I read on my Kindle as a galley) is told from the perspective of another New Yorker involved in the class-action suit, only never to be heard from or rarely mentioned again. The Locals keeps you on your toes. You don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Which brings us to the key deficiency of The Locals. There are a ton of characters in this novel — some who come and go, never to be mentioned again — and not only is it hard to keep track without keeping notes, but all of them are, excuse my language, assholes. Every single one of them. They have far more unredeeming qualities than they have good ones. So, naturally, when bad things start to happen to them, we don’t care. Not at all. While the point of fiction is to document the human condition, and I realize that small towns are full of jerks (having been raised in one myself), not everyone is a bad apple through and through. These people, however, are self-absorbed to a point where it is almost parody. Are Americans, especially small-town Americans, really like this? I mean, they probably are to some extent, but it’s hard to read about it in a novel — which is a source of escapism for many readers.

The other problem I had is that Dee doesn’t describe his characters at all, so you base the pictures in your mind of them on the dialogue fully and completely. This is a problem. Mark, as a character, is so nebbish that I imagined him as a bit of a Larry David-esque character. Except he appears to be in his 30s at the novel’s outset. Except that he is a home renovator, so then I was imagining him as a Bob Villa type. Except that he lives in Massachusetts. You get the drift. While I don’t always remember character descriptions, with so many characters in this sprawling novel, you really need something to remember everyone by. Dee provides only the faintest of sketches. Kind of a problem from a writer who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Yet, I found myself missing this New England small town when I closed the cover on my Kindle for the final time. I suppose there’s enough intrigue in this book to make it a bit of a literary thriller. In the end, The Locals is a bit of a mixed-bag. On one hand, it offers a scathing critique of American democracy, which is particularly timely in the age of Trump. In fact, despite the novel’s time setting, it could very well be about how Trump came to power and the circumstances that would let people vote in someone like him. On the other hand, it’s a real drag to read about you-know-whats. None of these characters are particularly likeable, and, indeed, every single one of them comes across as selfish and vain. Again, this may be part of the reason for The Locals’ existence. That might be the whole point. Still, it’s rather hard to swallow over the course of a long, sprawling novel.

So take that for what it’s worth. You either like The Locals for being so relevant, or you’ll hate it for being pitiless. I fell somewhat in-between on the spectrum, I suppose. I see the value in the book, but I did find it hard to read and took a long time to really get going. I didn’t like any of the characters, who were too shrill to my tastes. Still, if you want to read about the here and now, and how we got there, The Locals is the novel, for the time being, that does its best to explain today’s volatile American society at its worst.

I liked the book and thought it was an interesting quick read. From the description, I did not think it would be the kind of book I would typically enjoy, but when you sent me the email with George Saunders' recommendation I had to try it. I did like it, but I may not be the target audience, so please read my thoughts & personal opinions with that in mind.

I thought the characters were all very interesting, but this actually frustrated me a bit because they were all somehow rather minor characters in the greater story of the city. The town, along with its political environment, was really the main character.. I didn't understand why I read that rather long intro only to have the other character never appear again, and I found that throughout the book. Was Philip Hadi a good guy or a bad guy? I still don't know. . Why did I get to know the details of the heating/cooling/city council member only to have him die without much relevance? Too many characters underdeveloped and too many loose ends for me but really only because I was interested in them all and wanted more than I felt was delivered.

Even after voicing this frustration, I did like the book. It was well written with many faceted characters and never dull. I can see how the novel is very appropriate for this political time, because this small town is really representative of our country as a whole. I also will recommend it for our book club, because there are many interesting discussions that can come out of it. Thank you very much for sharing the ARC with me. It is very helpful to read books early when developing book club plans!

There's not a lot going on in this book. No romance, mystery, twists or turns...just a beautifully written story about daily life in a small town in Massachusetts. But it's an insightful and thought-provoking narrative by an extremely talented writer. I thoroughly enjoyed this book from beginning to end. Pure perfection.

I found the writing stiff and the characters uncompelling--not the book for me, but I think it will probably do OK.