The Locals: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of August 2017: Back in 2012, Jonathan Dee wrote, “Only bad literature proselytizes…Great literature sees, without advocacy and without pity.” His new novel, The Locals, is indeed great, partly because it fulfills the requirements of that dictum. Dee doesn’t proselytize, but does “see” very clearly the intersecting lives of the residents of Howland, a fictional town in the Berkshires. After 9/11, a wealthy New York financier moves in, and in short order becomes the town’s First Selectman, eschewing a salary, repealing taxes, and behaving, in both popular and unpopular ways, like the prince of a blue-collar fiefdom. Dee, an extraordinary mimic, inhabits the quirky voice of one character, and then another. Those shifts of perspective give a polyphonic, democratic feel to this novel. Social isolation, real-estate speculation and the promise of love: it’s America in a microcosm, but it’s to Dee’s credit that his readers are never entirely sure how he thinks any of us could do better. --Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review