Is it a surprise that the debut novel from one of our best-known environmental activists focuses on grassroots resistance? In backwoods Vermont, two radicals use an underground radio show to recruit people interested in seceding from the United States. What follows is a zany, witty, and altogether timely imagination of modern resistors.” – The Millions – Kirkus Reviews –Publishers Weekly “Radio Free Vermont is a charming bit of artisanal resistance lit…what’s surprising is how well-crafted the book is overall; how unhokey its folksiness feels, and how true it’s observations ring.”–Jennifer Senior, The New York Times –Booklist (starred review)–Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine Radio Free Vermont - a weird and utterly joyous if sometimes hair-raising romp through the dark Wonderland of life under Trump. Bill McKibben is a brilliant storyteller, and I love this book, which is balm for our troubled times."–Jay Parini, author of The Last Station –Bernie Sanders Radio Free Vermont may not save the world — but it succeeds wildly in making the formidable prospect of resistance feel a bit more fun." –NPR.org "A little comic story with a big political message" – The Washington Post – Book Page –Oustide – The Christian Science Monitor “A delightful romp.” – The Buffalo News “A witty tour de force.” –The Addison County Independent
What good can fiction do? Dust jacket patter says it can take us to new places and introduce us to voices we'd otherwise miss. Neuroscientists insist it can help us develop empathy. Kafka famously said it can take an ax to that frozen sea within us. All noble accomplishments, to be sure -- but also abstracted, hard-to- quantify ones. (How much empathy? How many seas?) So what are the concrete things that a novel can accomplish? Can a work of fiction be a meaningful form of activism?Uncle Tom's Cabin played a critical role in the abolitionist cause. The horrific stockyard scenes in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle helped tighten meat inspection regulations -- though it didn't foment an American socialist uprising, Sinclair's true hope for the book. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath helped prompt congressional hearings on Dust Bowl migrant camps. Edward Abbey's 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, was a totemic work for the environmental movement and a direct inspiration for Earth First!, an infamous group of sand-in-the-gears radicals.Radio Free Vermont, is not a very good work of fiction, it's also a way to say that it's a novel that's part of a long lineage. McKibben is a longtime environmental writer and activist who's written a stack of nonfiction books sounding warnings about climate and the influence of money and government upon it; along with Al Gore and Naomi Klein, he's threaded the needle of stating the seriousness of the stakes without being a panic-stricken catastrophist. The very existence of Radio Free Vermont reveals how passionate he is about his cause -- he'd write an epic poem in iambic tetrameter on CO2 levels if he thought it'd help get his message over. But he's also cognizant of how gently he needs to tread. The plot of his novel involves a Vermont secessionist movement stoked by computer hacking and vandalism (in one scene a Walmart is flooded with sewage). But its center is an avuncular seventy-two-year-old radio host named Vern Barclay, who agitates for radical action with a Keillor-esque calm. "The towns where we knew each other and looked out for each other weren't working so well anymore," he laments on-air, explaining how he got religion on secession.A Fable of Resistance . But even by that standard, the story is vapor-thin: Nefarious federals from central casting chase down Vern's cohort, there is much talk about the fate of Social Security benefits in the sovereign nation of Vermont, and its final plot twist is reminiscent of '80s teen dramedies where the school principal is revealed saying something super-duper-mean that got caught on tape. Even Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in his blurb for the book, can't bring himself to wholeheartedly board this train. ("I hope no one secedes, but I also hope . . . ")Radio Free Vermont 's flaws reveal just how pronounced the problem of writing an activist novel in the twenty-first century is. How do you write an optimistic, progressive novel in a literary culture steeped in dystopia, where the prevailing mood is failure and collapse? McKibben has not been alone in this struggle -- the non-dystopian activist novel has had a rough road in recent years. It is either too much a function of the politics of the moment, which gives it a short shelf life. (Consider Frederic C. Rich's 2013 novel, Christian Nation, which imagined a Sarah Palin presidency.) Or it re-litigates the past, which blunts its impact. (Sunil Yapa's 2016 novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, which revisits the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, is a prominent recent example.) As evidence of what stokes activism, and what activism demands, they're effective enough works. But as stories about people, with a longer view of the errors of history and their aftereffects, they face the same struggles McKibben does.Radio Free Vermont suggests a way forward, though. The novel's setup strongly evokes The Monkey Wrench Gang, which also involves a quartet of law-flouting radicals who protest the power structure but are mindful not to put anybody in harm's way. Abbey's radicals travel across Utah and Arizona pulling out survey stakes, breaking bulldozers, and blowing up (empty) bridges in the name of slowing down the advance of progress and the rough soles of developers' boots. Story-wise, it's full of the kind of hokum that'd make Mark Twain blush -- impossible escapes, bad puns, sexist banter.Radio Free Vermont, and as such McKibben can't clear a fictional path to move us to upend a trashcan in a Costco. More often, the vista that Vern contemplates is a drier political scene. "The U.S. has worked, not perfectly but perfectly well, for a very long time," he muses. "Trump, true. But we survived Nixon. And Warren Harding. What kind of stunt was it to insist that he'd figured out some better future?" The activist novel will last as long as writers are willing imagine that better future. But it's also a clumsy, difficult genre that transcends itself, if it ever does, when the novelist places us not just in our current predicament but in the just and fair place we imagine we might someday be.Mark Athitakis is a writer, editor, critic, and blogger who’s spent more than a dozen years in journalism. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Chicago Sun-Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Washington City Paper, and many other publications. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.
Reviewer: Mark Athitakis
The Barnes & Noble Review
In his public appearances, McKibben, a Vermonter and one of the best-known environmentalists of our age, can be an extremely droll and appealing Cassandra. But there's little in his many previous books to suggest he can pull off a novel-length satire…Yet Radio Free Vermont is a charming bit of artisanal resistance lit. It's a bit rough, with the occasional nailhead poking up too high…But what's surprising is how well-crafted the book is overall; how unhokey its folksiness feels, and how true its observations ring…Radio Free Vermont is more than "A Fable of Resistance," as its subtitle says. It's a love letter to the modest, treed-in landscape of Vermont, which Barclay wouldn't trade for all the grandeur of Montana. It's a dirge for the intense cold…It is an elegy for a slower, saner Vermont…and dependable Yankee virtues, like neighborliness and self-reliance and financial prudence.
The New York Times - Jennifer Senior
09/11/2017
★ 09/15/2017
Narrator Danny Campbell perfectly captures this audiobook’s protagonist, Vern Barclay, a 72-year-old lifelong Vermonter and accidental freedom fighter. After the protest of a new Wal-Mart takes an unexpected turn, Vern, a former talk-radio host, goes rogue and broadcasts from a secret location as “Radio Free Vermont.” Vern fills the airwaves with talk of secession from the U.S., and his eccentric crew carries out inventive acts of resistance, like the amusingly polite heist of a Coors Beer truck. Campbell’s friendly, raspy voice is ideal for Vern, who is world-weary but ultimately optimistic. There isn’t much vocal variation for other characters, but they’re broadly drawn anyway, and Vern is very much the heart of the story. A.T.N. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
NOVEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
Narrator Danny Campbell perfectly captures this audiobook’s protagonist, Vern Barclay, a 72-year-old lifelong Vermonter and accidental freedom fighter. After the protest of a new Wal-Mart takes an unexpected turn, Vern, a former talk-radio host, goes rogue and broadcasts from a secret location as “Radio Free Vermont.” Vern fills the airwaves with talk of secession from the U.S., and his eccentric crew carries out inventive acts of resistance, like the amusingly polite heist of a Coors Beer truck. Campbell’s friendly, raspy voice is ideal for Vern, who is world-weary but ultimately optimistic. There isn’t much vocal variation for other characters, but they’re broadly drawn anyway, and Vern is very much the heart of the story. A.T.N. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
NOVEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
