American by Day and the paradox of individualism

This novel portrays Sigrid, a female Norwegian police officer who featured in Norwegian by Night. Learning her brother is missing in America, she goes looking and meets Irv, an American sheriff who studied divinity rather than criminology. Wary at first, the two cops develop enough mutual trust to tackle the problem they share, though it has different implications for each of them. Sigrid fears for the safety of her brother Marcus, who has run like a guilty fugitive from the scene where his lover dropped to her death from a high building. In Irv's world, the professor's death raises the American spectre of race relations.

At a tense confrontation in from of a biker bar by a Target parking lot, Sigrid recalls how Norwegian gangs "adopted American tropes about freedom, individuality, and rebellion and demanded complete conformity to them."

According to academic race relations expert Lydia Jones, the paradox of American cultural individualism is "both the problem and the solution." She explains that "'What we're up against now is a conservative movement anchored in a way of seeing Americanness that says that any attention to group problems, or trying to actively support diversity through representation is actually divisive and discriminatory itself...They see the entire world through this individualism prism," which "negates discussions of race and racism...One can't escape the observation that America historically enslaves groups, but only frees individuals.'"

Marcus, also a teacher, makes similar observations about the students who are plugged in to their phones, thinking "the more they strive to express their uniqueness in those machines, the more conformist they become."

Miller's language is smart and funny, which makes it easy to absorb unpalatable truths. We laugh when Irv explains that "nobody has ever overestimated the intellect of a man in cowboy boots," which is why he wears them. We like him better for  having left his job using his "knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew to help name pharmaceutical products," when he realized that "most of the products aren't meant to cure you but make you dependent on the treatment." That felt wrong.

Sigrid's perspective on American policing is fact-based and clear. Citing a recent article, she tells Irv, "While we don't know how many citizens are killed by the police, we do know how many cops have been killed by criminals...the overall number of murdered officers has been dropping in a nice flattening curve since the 1970s." The perceived "war on the police" is illusory; there's been nothing close to that since Prohibition in the 1920s.

This book features variable and shifting perspectives, shown mostly using Sigrid's point of view. "Why," she wonders idly as she flips through the TV channels in a motel room, "is overacting preferred in situation comedies but not in dramas?" In a more serious moment, she decides that "The heart is one of the few places where facts and truth may be separable." Shopping in Target provides a salutary reminder of privilege: the low prices make her feel "a momentary pang of guilt for the abducted and enslaved children who surely weaved the clothing with their tiny little fingers." She finds it "unsettling how quickly that feeling fades as she "holds up a pair of ...jeans being sold...for twelve dollars, the price of coffee and a muffin in Oslo." And as Sigrid tells Irv, there are no glass barriers between the front and rear seats of Norwegian cruisers; it's unheard-of for Norwegian criminals to shoot police.

She also feels that American horror movies reflect the culture: the invariably end "with someone being self-reliant and overcoming her own fear or else failing to do that and dying." Unable to think of a single movie "where the horror was overcome through strategy, cooperation, teamwork, or planning," she reflects to Irv that "the terrible machine you've created," explains "why Americans buy guns rather than build institutions," which does not make anyone safer.

The differing perspectives of the sexes comes up for some gentle ribbing too. The SWAT team scenes feature hilariously clownish portrayals of trigger-happy macho males, whose hasty and ill-considered actions incite in Sigrid a flash of anger against men, for "their stupidity, their lies, their egotism, their irrelevant words, their aggressive personalities and their hairy backs...the ease by which they open jars and their inexplicable incapacity to return even the smallest object" to its rightful location. However, knowing that she cares deeply about her brother and respects her male colleague, the reader can smile at her snit as she slogs through the forest ruining her good Italian shoes.

Strangely, just after reading this novel, I learned another piece of the American cultural puzzle from a recently published essay. For American citizens, no matter where they live, work and earn, that there is no escape from filing taxes in the US, and failure to comply can carry heavy financial penalties. Paradoxically, I was gobsmacked to learn that it costs $2350 to relinquish one's US citizenship - a costly sanction against no longer wanting to be American.

In a recent essay, Mark Manson takes the concept of paradox beyond culture into the realm of human biology. We need to maintain homeostasis, a salubrious balance between opposites. This concept, he says, also has applications in psychology, for instance, as we are obliged to seek company, then retreat into ourselves, or cycle between seeking novelty and maintaining a reassuring routine.

Humans are contradictory and paradoxical, and our behaviour is often unaccountable. Reading fiction is a good way to face the irrationality of our views and actions. The work of Derek B. Miller is enlightening and thought-provoking as well as entertaining. While he admits that as a novelist, he takes "some liberties with reality," he deserves kudos for showing us realities we all face, thus expanding our perspective on the human condition.