You Don't Have to Live Like This

A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America—one man’s story of a racially charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan.

“You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.”

Greg Marnier, Marny to… (more)

A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America—one man’s story of a racially charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan.

Greg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn’t much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President—not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny’s billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project “the Groupon model for gentrification,” others call it “New Jamestown,” and Marny calls it home— until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong.

You Don’t Have to Live Like This is the breakout novel from the “fabulously real” (Guardian) voice of the only American included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Using the framework of our present reality, Benjamin Markovits blurs the line between the fictional and the fact-based, and captures an invisible current threaded throughout American politics, economics, and society that is waiting to explode.

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Fiction Literary American and Canadian literature

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Editorial reviews (2 reviews)

The Guardian : You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Ben Markovits review – a study of tense race relations (July 12, 2015)

Markovits’s seventh work of fiction is a considered examination of tense race relations, warning us that communities are delicate ecosystems that shouldn’t be tampered with, even by those with the best of intentions.

Lit Reactor : Bookshots: 'You Don't Have to Live Like This' by Benjamin Markovits (July 09, 2015)

You Don’t Have to Live Like This comes at the perfect time, extracting white attitudes about race and justice, and ever so gently forcing us to think about them, even when, like Marny, we’d prefer just to watch.