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The Resisters is a dystopian novel. We enter AutoAmerica. The book’s world also includes ChinRussia. Both countries play complementary roles when they need to learn technological control off each other, but are at competetive ends when it comes to baseball.
AutoAmerica is built on the segregation of the Netted from the Surplus. The Netted are AngelFair and the Surplus can be assumed to be the others. The Netted work, the Surplus are unemployable. The Netted live on land and the Surplus live in a sort of waterworld.
The story revolves around Surpluses Gwen, who’s a gifted baseball pitcher, her mother Eleanor, who is leading the resistance against this dystopia and her father, the narrator.
Writing a dystopian novel, requires building the world these characters need to fight, and the author has spent a substantial part of the novel in doing so and that is my key takeaway from this book.
Setting:
AutoAmerica, AuntNettie, GreetingGram, Sweeting, BioNet, SkyCar fill this world. The author has invented technology with self-explanatory names, inspired from our present, to call the various gadgets and control devices in AutoAmerica which exists sometime in the future. GonadWrap, for instance, is imaginative and can dispense with the need to be explained in scientific terms, although a Science Fiction book would have. We know from the terms used that this dystopia believes in technological control of humanness.
The book is divided into four parts, nearly two parts of which lay out this setting. Once the action begins, the setting is peppered throughout.
Plot:
This is a plot-based book. There is a protagonist, an antagonist and a setting. The plot moves from an inciting incident to a climax, and there’s a resolution. It’s a sports story, and we know there will be a crucial deciding match in the end. This plot is set in a dystopia, thereby, raising questions of the condition of human existence, adding another layer to this story about baseball. This makes the struggle for the protagonist an ideological one, not merely a personal one, the conflict.
Characters:
I enjoyed the character of the antagonist in the book. Although, the dystopian world is the primary antagonist, there is also an enabler. And it was interesting to see how Ondi changes from the beginning of the book, to the middle and then towards the end. It was also interesting to note the changes in Winny and Woody through the book.
This is a book where the protagonist remained more or less constant from the beginning till the end. Except for events that serve as catalysts and resultant reactions by the protagonist, we do not see Gwen changing, significantly, making the plot of the book and not the characters stand out.
POV
Through the book, we see the actions play out from the lens of Gwen’s father. When Gwen moves to NetU, we hear of the happenings in Gwen’s life through GreetingGrams, PigeonGrams and the bugs her father has installed in her room. Although, how her father achieved it has not been detailed, science that the sci-fi reader in me craves for. But then, on the realistic end I understand the tone of the book leans towards the social aspects of technological control of our lives, thoughts and privacy through big data.
I only wish the narrator were not as passive an observer, well listener, of the happenings in Gwen’s and Eleanor’s lives. I was hoping for more thoughts from the narrator since he’s a character in the book as well. Show and tell.
I enjoyed the book for the plot. It’s a dystopian world with a simple story in it.
Book Title: The Resisters
Author: Gish Jen
First Publisher: Vintage Books, 2020
Number of Pages: 301
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