An American Dreamer - David Finkel

 

If cotton candy were a book, it would be called American Dreamer: Living in a Divided Country. Maybe because David Finkel is a Pulitzer Prize Winner I expected too much, but my lingering impression of American Dreamer is that no one living in the United States during the last decade will be surprised by, or much enlightened by, anything that Finkel has to say here. Any American who has paid even the least attention to what has been happening all around them (and who has the ability to express themselves on paper) could have written this one. If like me, you expected to learn how and why the country became so politically divided, and what we can do together to become more united, you are going to be disappointed.

American Dreamer opens on the morning following the 2016 election as Brent Cummings and his wife wake up to the (to them) appalling realization that Donald J. Trump is the president-elect of the United States. Cummings, an Iraq War veteran with twenty-five years of service, was born in Mississippi but moved to New Jersey with his family when he was eight years old. By November 2016, he is in charge of 750 ROTC cadets at the University of North Georgia. The book is primarily from Cummings's point of view, and how he reacts to his very conservative next-door neighbor, a wheelchair bound man who is just as thrilled as Cummings is upset about Trump's election.

Finkel observes that the two men can barely speak with each other without the distinct possibility that one, or both, of them will lose their temper and say something that there will be no coming back from. So they take to being super-polite to each other and purposely talking very little about politics at all. Consequently, they don't really know each other and never will. 

Then the book is over.

The reader has been treated to a rather short and unremarkable biography of Brent and a much less detailed one of Michael, his neighbor. It is not difficult to see which of the two men Finkel sees as the more sympathetic, especially because one of the most widely debunked charges against Trump from the last several years is mentioned several times in the book without once representing Michael's understanding of the same event. Finkel seems to believe that the two men will never really understand each other. Their political beliefs and expectations are just too far apart for that to happen. By extension, I have to wonder if Finkel sees the whole country that way, and not just these two individuals. If so, I can't agree with him.

The big problem for me is that I don't think Finkel has made a serious effort here to identify solutions or causes of America's (the world's?) political divide. American Dreamer reads more like something Finkel threw together between more serious work, and as a result it had the same impact on me as all the empty calories found inside a state fair serving of pink cotton candy...still empty, and wonder why I bothered.