A shredding facility employee encounters a mysterious film and becomes obsessed with finding its director.
"What follows is an account of events experienced by the above man. As a film subject, he was one of the best I've ever seen, despite a complete lack of dramatic ability. The sources I've used for the creation of this report are, in the main, video footage-both consensual interviews with the subject and footage generated without his knowledge. At the time of this writing, he is employed at a facility called Shred Authority Neighborhood Storage. In terms of familial relationships, he has two sisters (no contact), a mother (no contact), and a father (yearly contact). His sexual interests are best described as disappointingly vanilla with longtime urges for mild deviancy. Hobbies include cycling, occasional woodworking, and researching arcane topics on the Internet and internalizing them. He lacks a formal education, yet is adept at finding information, albeit in an unsystematic way. I chose this subject not because of the events he experienced-though they are thrilling and profound-but because he stumbled across something that no one could turn away from. Though a select few of you may be familiar with my film work, I've recently retired to pursue other forms, hence the at times novelistic appearance of the following narrative"--
Brooks Sterritt writes like a demented John McPhee. - Luis Alberto Urrea
If Nicholson Baker wrote The Crying of Lot 49 it might read something like The History of America in My Lifetime. Mind-bending, suspenseful, and extremely funny—I found this novel the perfect balance of intellectual challenge and pure pleasure. - Jac Jemc
The History of America in My Lifetime slips into the neural network of your brain and declines extraction—an amazing and unforgettable novel. - Michael Kimball
The History of America in My Lifetime is the first book by Brooks Sterritt, an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston-Victoria. A satire of our data-driven societies, of modern surveillance systems, and of the irrationality of the Western world, it is a novel about capitalist America and our struggle to understand it. It is a book, as Brooks Sterritt said on Twitter, “about the movies.” Movies, yes, but snuff movies in particular: while never getting too graphic, The History of America in My Lifetime is not a book for the faint-hearted.
A summary of it would go as follows: in an undefined year (around 2021), an unnamed shredding facility employee is about to board a plane to return home from a Supranational Association of Information Destruction (SAID)’s conference when he sees a man whose face “could only be called pixelated.” Our protagonist shows us that he wants to not believe in what he sees: after all, he is mentally sane, isn’t he? He knows what is real and what isn’t. The next day, he makes plans to “catch a matinee” with his friend Liam, with no intention of talking about the airport encounter. The two of them see a movie by director named Lucian Bevacqua. The movie, mainly a series of long-takes, features the same man with the same pixelated face. Here starts the narrator’s quest to find the truth. The book then proceeds to drag the reader into the mind of this unreliable narrator, while he discovers (or makes up?) a scheme around a mysterious movie director, a mysterious company, and a mysterious man. All the elements fit together, if you let the book take you where it wants to go: page by page, we see the narrator destroying his carefully curated life, while he goes on chasing a series of clues and symbols that do not exist. Or do they? By giving us glimpses into his protagonist’s thoughts, Sterritt manages to create a connection between him and us, intricately muddling true and false, fake and real. “It seemed unlikely, though not impossible, that Blanche met Liam through random channels, or had known him for some time. It seemed impossible.”
Filming and being filmed, CCTV, back and front webcams on computers, the lack of security and anonymity in the online world, and the knowledge that any online interaction leaves a trace are starting points for the narrator’s paranoia. It is no coincidence that Sterritt’s character works in a shredding facility: there is no shredding of documents in our online-driven world. “Looking at the image, I had the sensation of being watched, but also of watching myself; typing, searching, chasing leads in pursuit of — what?” he says. As readers, we also know that the main protagonist’s thinking is deeply rooted in a sense of unease that comes from the fact that he knows he lives in a micro-chipped, surveillance-systems filled, impersonal world. By following this particular narrator, the author teaches us about the history of America in our lifetime: Sterritt has written a critique of contemporary America.
Sterritt also plays with narration to capture the doubleness and doubt that such a world engenders. The narrator’s paranoia, and another unexplained mental disorder that becomes apparent as you read, give license to a narrative technique that produces two different modes of reading the novel: two different viewpoints. Every narrative detail could be a clue about an hidden conspiracy, laden with meaning. Or not. As the narrator performs this uncertainty towards the end of the book: “The individual I was meeting went by the username cuLtLeader, something I could have attributed meaning to but somehow didn’t.” One of my favorite aspects of the book was that readers have to use their own imaginations to resolve these uncertainties.
The narrator describes his life as a series of loops, an image the author uses several times in the book. At the end of the book, having set his car on autopilot, he drives it (or it drives him) in a series of rotations, each rotation getting him closer to the truth, with no idea when he will reach it, if he will reach it, and most importantly: if he wants to. A quest for the truth that encounters no satisfying ending, The History of America in My Lifetime’s last few lines encapsulates the satire of the entire novel: technology brings us both closer and further away from the answers we do not want, and the questions we cannot ask. The story ends where we would have expected it to begin again.
Because I felt like I had just read a contemporary version of The Crying of Lot 49, upon finishing I picked up my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s book, and re-read it. I then read Sterritt’s book a second time. The feeling remained: the unreliable narrator, the schematization of our political and historical issues, the use of irony, are all tied in together. Sterritt, by using the postmodernist conventions used by Pynchon in 1966, is echoing the author more than 50 years later. The paranoid characters live in a paranoid society, sick with new moral conventions denounced by the author as absurd. As with every postmodernist novel, unconventional methods of reading are also required, insofar as the narrative discloses the main problematics of the decade without talking directly of them. Like in Pynchon’s novel, Sterritt’s work requires effort, the unreliability of the narrator’s voice demanding constant attention. There is a discrepancy between what happens and what is relayed to the reader, between the story and the discourse. Both Oedipa and Sterritt’s narrator’s inconsistencies can be analysed side by side, with the main difference that Sterritt’s plot is easier to follow, but not less suffused with ideas and critiques. The narrative’s inconsistencies are the precise elements that allow the readers to use their imagination. But if Pynchon’s Oedipa is detached from the events happening to her and around her, Sterritt’s narrator often notices their absurdity but never questions it: part of the reason why the narrative voice is unreliable is because the question of whether our actions are pre-determined by a system just outside our perception is never answered. In the postmodernist’s vein, the novel is sceptical towards society: the new technoculture and our consumerist, hyper connected, almost cyber reality. And could the unreliable narrative voice echo an unreliable American government, in the same way Pynchon’s did? Like the news on your feed, The History of America in My Lifetime is worth reading cautiously, carefully. - Charlotte Lavin
THE UNNAMED PROTAGONIST of Brooks Sterritt’s debut novel, The History of America in My Lifetime — an employee of a “document storage and shredding facility” returning from “a conference organized by the Supranational Association for Information Destruction (SAID)” — stumbles across “something that no one could turn away from,” namely a man with a pixelated face, an effect called “fogging” or “tiling” in television or film. This imposition of a “screen” image onto real life starts the protagonist’s byzantine journey to seek out this man, and later to seek out a mythical underground filmmaker who specializes in surveillance footage.
The novel’s title is in reference to a quote by 20th-century British figure painter Francis Bacon who, Sterritt explains, “once quipped that a goal of his was to capture the history of Europe in his lifetime in a single image.” Like the painter, Sterritt’s desire to “capture the history of America in a lifetime in a single book” is a quixotic goal. What the novel does include — the compulsion to gather and process information (which is often ephemeral, unreliable, or qualified to the point perplexity); the fascination with watching (often mediated by screens) and the corollary fear (and desire) of being watched; the obsessive aestheticization of reality into a conspiratorial narrative — all point to the reality of living in a surveillance state, wherein we are being tracked by the very devices that we are enslaved to.
The History of America in My Lifetime, published in 2021 by longtime New York City indie publisher Spuyten Duyvil, draws clear comparisons to Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in terms of narrative structure, as well as the laconic, satirical humor and dark worldview of Samuel Beckett’s prose fiction. The protagonist’s compulsion to mentally catalog information, outcomes, and origins as he tries to make meaning out of the proliferation of data and characters he encounters, coupled with his muted affect, also calls to mind Beckett.
The following conversation is an edited interview I conducted with Sterritt over Zoom in early August 2021. The conversation ranges from thematic concerns of the novel, connections between novels and film, and writing communities local and online that illuminate Sterritt’s development as a writer “without a hometown” — and The History of America in My Lifetime, a novel about a nameless protagonist living in a nameless city.
DANIEL MAGERS: One aspect I found particularly interesting running through your novel is the conventions of detective novels, or of noir or neo-noir in film. There’s an atmosphere of paranoia, distrust of others — even and especially friends, people close to you. Use of intrigue and double cross, women as femme fatales, a journey through settings and scenes that feel very filmic. What drew you to these conventions? How do you think you are using them?
Early on, I was fascinated by locked-room mysteries, whodunits, and all kinds of pulpy stuff. Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, and even Isaac Asimov, who is mostly known for sci-fi but also wrote dozens of mystery stories and “puzzles.” Then there are books that kind of deconstruct the noir thing: Auster’s New York Trilogy and of course Beckett’s trilogy, especially Malone Dies.
I find film noir and film gris super interesting, the way the conventions have endured and changed. On the “neo” tip, I’ve watched Christopher Nolan’s Following (1998) at least 50 times. And this might sound funny, but working on the novel I watched probably hundreds of episodes of Forensic Files — not for research, per se, but because I became addicted. I was near a TV somewhere and an episode came on, and they’re 15 to 20 minutes long. And the narrative pull is like — they hook you in 15 seconds. You end an episode and the next one starts — they don’t even end on a commercial break, purposefully.
The thing about true crime is that it satisfies a hunger people have to read fiction, while also pretending to provide some utility in that they’re learning about real life or learning about a kind of history. Reading Tom Clancy or the literary equivalent because you’re getting all this submarine info on the side. Whether or not it is edifying you is totally beside the point. But along with Forensic Files, I was also fascinated with symbols and their decipherment. These symbols pop up throughout the book, and that’s probably enough of an answer. But it’s all connected for sure: the sleuthing, the missing pieces, the insoluble puzzle, the locked room.
Reading fiction for information is interesting. These detective or noirish conventions allow you to engage with deeper thematic issues: one of them is this sort of obsessive compulsion to gather information, often via the internet, to make meaning in the face of this impossibility of getting to the truth. The novel is incredibly interested in information as such — information, misinformation, cataloging information, unreliable information, ephemeral information, qualifications to the point of uncertainty.
Absolutely. I had all these ideas, and then at some point the Snowden revelations happened, which confirms what we always thought, that we’re being watched. More and more so through our devices and through our internet habits. On the other hand, one way my book is unlike the internet is its extreme linearity.
Going back to the information and data, sleuthing and collecting. We have so much at our fingertips, but we just collect bookmarks that we will never look at. Download and archive images that we will never sort through or ever return to. So, it’s this proliferation of data and information, and it goes right back to surveillance. We each produce so much data — valuable to corporations and to the government — too much data to look at it all without vast resources, which doesn’t happen unless you’re a terrorist or a journalist.
This idea of being monitored or watched has great bearing on all of us living in a surveillance state — I mean not just the government but corporations. Much of it is like, you know, not sinister, it’s to make money off us and how we use the internet, how we use our devices.
Well, you said it’s not sinister — it’s more that it’s not personal, I guess. I know to a certain degree it’s just part of the landscape or part of our environment, and would I prefer that to not be the case? Sure, but my interests in terms of the novel and surveillance were how and why to make a novel in this environment, and how the technology of the novel has responded to the emergence of surveillance tech.
You say that the novel takes place in a “world like the present,” which is a really interesting way of putting it. Do you see this as like a speculative novel? Is this literary realism? Do you think that there’s a spectrum between realism and the speculative?
I’d say it’s a realist book, depending on how you define realism. I think it was Fredric Jameson who said, if you examine the word “realism,” it begins to wobble. Is it realist, is it realistic, is it real — the question is, in what way? No book is a pure mirror, even if you sat down and attempted to write something photorealistic or a true depiction of a world that’s exactly like the present. It’s not a true mirror because it’s literature, it’s not real life.
I don’t know if I think in terms of the speculative, but several people brought up Black Mirror. And I think that’s a good example. Or take J. G. Ballard — it’s sort of a depiction of the world right now, but extrapolated and far shittier, which turns out to have pretty good odds of appearing prescient.
I just read Ling Ma’s Severance and last semester I taught Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory,” and both of those were published three and four years ago. They’re all about epidemics, in a sense — there is a clear speculative quality, an epidemic wipes out people and breaks down society, which has all become totally, totally true.
Those are great examples, and it’s interesting what takes on new resonance in light of current events. As far as the speculative goes, there are things that don’t exist whose depiction helps get at the truth of our world, whether they end up existing or not. It allows the freedom to tweak reality in order to get at something behind it, maybe. I think the gauge is less whether a book appears predictive, but whether a book speaks to our moment in advance or recognizes the unnoticed seeds of such a moment in the past.
While you were there writing the novel at University of Illinois at Chicago [where Sterritt received his PhD in English], you were studying the connection between novels and film. What connections do you see between the history of the novel and the history of film? What drew you to this?
What drew me to it was, I suppose, the pretty basic idea that novels have changed because of other available media, and vice versa. Early on, when people started creating short films and feature films, the models they had to go on were literary ones, often novels. It was fascinating to me to learn that D. W. Griffith gave the credit for his innovation of the close-up to Charles Dickens. Then you have Sergei Eisenstein writing that Griffith’s parallel montages were influenced by Flaubert! In a way this makes total sense, considering that novels were pretty much the dominant long-form narrative devices at the time, and what better for film to draw on?
But the kicker for me was when film editing “matured” and cuts and edits were becoming more obvious devices in film, that modernist literature in turn subsumes this, that a modernist novel like Ulysses has absorbed filmic techniques that arose in response to literary realism. And this evolution or this relation is still going, though in a faster and more splintered way, perhaps. - Dan Magers
read more here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-state-of-paranoia-an-interview-with-brooks-sterritt/
