"What is this world our parents are giving us, if not a disaster?" asks a teenager known only as The Prophet in Anthem, Noah Hawley's explosive new novel. It's a question young people around the world are rightfully posing—and one the writer can't stop thinking about.
In Anthem, out now, it's the end of the world as society knows it, and only teenagers can see the big picture. This epic literary thriller is set in a not-too-distant future, where the nation is hopelessly divided, the political system is broken, and the climate is barreling toward irrevocable disaster. (Familiar, right?) Crippled with anxiety about the rotten world they stand to inherit, high schoolers respond with a disturbing protest movement that soon becomes a global epidemic: mass suicide, “an act of collective surrender.” In this sorrowed world, stratified by money, power, and greed, three unlikely young heroes resist the movement and journey into the American West, where wildfires rage through the redwoods and homegrown terrorists stoke lethal violence. Their mission is an epic quest to save a friend from the Wizard, a Jeffrey Epstein-like monster—which may just save the world.
Anthem is a Great American Novel for these tumultuous times—a provocative work of fiction that sees to the heart of things, cuts through the noise, and asks, “How can we change, before it’s too late?” Hawley, the author of six novels, is also the creator of FX's Fargo and Legion, as well as the streamer's upcoming Alien series. This latest work cements his status as one of today's most versatile and accomplished storytellers.
The 54-year-old spoke with Esquire by Zoom to discuss the challenges facing today's teenagers and the prospect of sharing power with the next generation. As he insists in Anthem, "All we have to do is change."
Esquire: One of the most fascinating choices you've made in Anthem is the presence of an intrusive authorial voice. When did that enter the picture?
Noah Hawley: As the book evolved, I got to thinking about the toll of our culture wars and the denialism of contemporary America. This gives rise to real anxiety among our children. Where will that lead? There’s a discussion in the book about the contagiousness of an idea, which becomes virulent and spreads around the world, and that idea is suicide. In the course of that, I started to think about Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse Five is a fictionalized version of his own World War II experience in which he, the author, was a character. The main character had become unstuck in time, so it was a science fiction book. At one point, Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped and taken to another planet. These elements shouldn't work together, but they do. The book has this simple but powerful morality to it—and humor, as well.
I thought about that model when I was thinking about this book. If I want to have a conversation with the reader about where we are now and how our children are doing, I felt like I needed to be part of that conversation. I'm not lecturing you; I'm talking to you. It’s me, the author, and I'm not hiding behind fiction. I'm here. There's a moment in the book where I apologize for the book that I'm writing, because this moment in America has become so ridiculous that I can't help but reflect that ridiculousness back through fiction. My job as a novelist is to reflect the world that I live in. What do I do when the world I live in becomes ridiculous? I'm always looking, in anything I do, for the content of the story to reflect in the structure. This was the best way I knew how to accomplish that.
Esquire: As the intrusive author, you hem and haw over the presence of guns in the story, and struggle to justify it. You make mention of “the shooting range that was high school and middle school and elementary.” That's gutting in its truth.
N.H.: I wrote that section during the lockdown when our children weren't going to school. Projecting into the future when they went back, I thought about how ironic it was that they were safer locked in their homes. What we’ve seen in the last year is a return to the school shootings that have defined the apprehension about education, these days.
For me, a big part of this book is trying to look at the world through my children's eyes. We have so many conversations with them where we have to say, “It’s complicated.” Climate change is complicated; the gun debate is complicated. Then you read Greta Thunberg's speech at the UN, where she says, “it's not complicated at all. Either the planet heats two degrees or it doesn't.” Like in Vonnegut, there’s a simplicity to the morality. You shouldn't have to say that school should be a place where no one can shoot anyone else. And yet, apparently we have to say that, and apparently it doesn't accomplish anything to say that. What message is it sending to our children, that they're dying and we can't seem to save them?
Esquire: Do you feel the same about guns and violence on screen as you do in novels?
N.H.: I never want violence to be entertainment. Thinking about Fargo, with the Coen brothers as a model, the violence in their movies is always sudden and always gruesome. My approach in Fargo has been that violence onscreen is a useful way to help the viewer examine what they wanted to happen. You thought you wanted violence because we're trained to want violence, but what if the violence is ugly and awful? It's not so easy, I hope, to root for one person to kill another person. In Season Two of Fargo, Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst are trapped between two crime families. We think, “Whoever they send to kill these two, we're rooting for Kirsten and Jesse,” but then they send the young son with cerebral palsy. Now who are you rooting for? You don't want that kid killed either. It puts the viewer in an uncomfortable position, examining what they thought they wanted. Too much of our modern story landscape is based on the idea that one person must kill another person for the story to be satisfying.
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Esquire: Our young people are steeped in these tropes, as you highlight in the novel. You have characters named Randall Flagg and Katniss; meanwhile, there are lines like, “They knew what Obi-Wan knew,” or, “They’d both grown up on Marvel movies and Hollywood fables of self-empowerment.” How do you think pop culture shapes how our young people make sense of the world today?
N.H.: There’s a teenager in this book who survived Parkland, now calling himself Randall Flagg, who meets Simon, our protagonist. Simon says, “Isn’t that a fictional character from a Stephen King book?” Randall says, “It’s a fictional world, why can't I be a fictional character?” We saw from the strange cosplay of January 6th how tenuous the line between fantasy and reality is. I go to some extremes in the book, calling these groups the Tyler Durdens or the War Boys, but those are the references. Our children aren't necessarily learning lessons from real people about how to be a man, or how to be heroic in this world. They're learning those lessons from entertainment. That’s a dangerous thing, because so much of our entertainment is designed to be emotionally manipulative and melodramatic about justice. We’ve reached a moment where for a lot of people, it's very hard to distinguish between real life and fantasy.
Esquire: When we struggle to distinguish between real life and fantasy, what's the psychic cost?
N.H.: If you talk to people from more authoritarian countries, they’re used to living in two realities. They're used to the idea that the government tells you a lie, which you have to go by publicly, while also holding a separate sense of objective reality. It’s not necessarily something we've had to deal with in America. I think a lot of the psychic anxiety and tension we've experienced over the last few years is the realization that we’re in a similar scenario.
I remember seeing Newt Gingrich on CNN during the run-up to the 2016 election. He said, “Crime is up all over the country.” The reporter said, “No, it's not. It's down, actually. That's a fact.” He said, “People feel like it's up, and that’s also a fact.” What just happened? But that's where we are. We’re in a moment where some of us believe the facts, and some of us believe our feelings are also facts—truer even than facts. I write in the book about the Kingdom of Wall Street and the Kingdom of Main Street. The Kingdom of Wall Street is a place of rational science where numbers matter, while the Kingdom of Main Street is more emotional and instinctive. They’re two different Americas. What do you teach your kids about how to navigate that?
Esquire: Of course every generation experiences their teenage years differently, but it's a very charged and memorable time for all of us. How did you return yourself to what it’s like to be a teenager?
N.H.: So much of it is about social uncertainty. I was reading Harry Potter to my son recently. In those books, no one tells these kids anything. They're born into a war that they didn't start and they don't know what to do with. They keep going to the adults to say, “We think there's something really wrong here,” and the adults say, “Go back to your classes; we’re not telling you anything.” It struck me as a metaphor for the childhood experience. There’s a section in Anthem where I suggest that learning human history is horrifying for children. We feed them pancakes for breakfast and send them off to learn about six million Jewish people dying in the Holocaust. Over the last twenty years, we've tried more and more to insulate them from the difficulties and the horrors of adult life. As a result, they don't know where to learn those lessons. That was part of returning myself to teenhood.
Esquire: Unusually enough, this book is steeped in numbers and statistics. Math isn’t usually the province of the novelist. What was your interest in numbers?
N.H.: The first thing I wrote is the first line of the book: “This book contains math.” Some of it a way to have this conversation—if we’re going to talk about fact and fiction, then the facts have to be real facts. The statistics of our life are important benchmarks. In trying to understand why people stormed the Capitol, we have to ask: how many years have we been at war? How many soldiers been killed or injured? What you realize is that there’s a whole generation of people whose natural state is war, because we've always been at war.
Esquire: Then I get to thinking about how numbers can be manipulated, and how algorithms are imperfect, made by biased people.
N.H.: That’s the futility of it. Crime is down, but it feels like it's up. There’s a moment in the book where Simon is talking about the Kingdom of Wall Street and the Kingdom of Main Street. He thinks, “One of these two kingdoms is delusional, but I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't mine.” All of this reliance on rationalization, science, and reason—maybe we're the crazy ones, because this idea that if they just saw the facts, they’d see the world as we see it… that’s magical thinking. So who's delusional in this scenario?
Esquire: I wouldn't describe this as a doom and gloom book, but you certainly paint a sobering picture of the future today's young people stand to inherit. So I’m curious: what gives you hope for today’s young people?
N.H.: My son is nine. Recently he asked me, “Why do grownups get to decide everything?” I said, “Honestly, I don't know. We're not that good at it. You have to listen to me, but generally, I don't understand why.” Looking at the world they're going to inherit, my instinct is that we should turn this over to them much younger than ever before. Every corporate board of directors should have a child or two on it. Nobody over 60 should hold public office anymore. Power corrupts, and people want to hold to it. My hope is that the issue is going to be forced. It was forced in the 1960s and it changed things. My hope is that we can't stand in the way anymore. We're not solving the problem, so let’s bring young people into the decision-making organizations. Let’s create a power share with the next generation.
I describe Fargo as a show about the people we long to be, decent and kind, versus the people we fear the most, vicious and unfeeling. It’s a very romantic idea of small-town America. But then I look at the school board meetings and I think, “Look at all those self-defined decent and kind people who are threatening teachers with violence. Is the decency gone? Or have the vicious and unfeeling people corrupted them?” You see Fox News hosts and politicians who have been vaccinated telling Americans not to get the shot. It’s such a cynical thing. But when feelings become facts, it's hard to counter.
Esquire: FX's John Landgraf described your upcoming Alien spin-off as “a beast,” and “a really big world-building exercise” for you. What can you tell us about how the world-building exercise is going?
N.H.: It's going great. It's going slowly, unfortunately, given the scale of it. I've made a certain business out of reinvention. Alien is a fascinating story because it's not just a monster movie; it’s about how we're trapped between the primordial past and the artificial intelligence of our future, where both trying to kill us. It’s set on Earth of the future. At this moment, I describe that as Edison versus Westinghouse versus Tesla. Someone’s going to monopolize electricity. We just don't know which one it is.
In the movies, we have this Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which is clearly also developing artificial intelligence—but what if there are other companies trying to look at immortality in a different way, with cyborg enhancements or transhuman downloads? Which of those technologies is going to win? It’s ultimately a classic science fiction question: does humanity deserve to survive? As Sigourney Weaver said in that second movie, “I don't know which species is worse. At least they don't fuck each other over for a percentage.” Even if the show was 60% of the best horror action on the planet, there's still 40% where we have to ask, “What are we talking about it, beneath it all?” Thematically, it has to be interesting. It’s humbling to get to play with the iconography of this world.
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source: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a38591125/noah-hawley-anthem-alien-fargo-interview/
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