A masterly saga of a broken nation, Linh writes his Postcards from the End of America as he moves from town to town by rail and bus, with lots of walking, each one anchored by a theme, sort of, though what stands out are the deftly sketched portraits of mostly down-and-out survivors of the pressure cooker America, seething and occasionally exploding in violence and collapse.
What is powerful is the intensely personal look inside the beast. Linh calls himself “a Unapoet”,* a “PayPal-buttoned, reader-supported blogger”. He writes with care and at the same time, abandon, occasionally losing it with angry Unabomber** diatribes.
But given the subject matter, it’s hard to fault him. In an interview with Diacritics, he calls it “a diary of America’s ongoing collapse, and I’ve learnt much from roaming around.” A kind of Unatourism.
There are lots of American road books and movies: Easy Rider (1969) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971). Linh has been compared to Bukovsky, but identifies more with Rabelais and Artaud.
From Louis-Ferdinand Celine, “I learnt that a writer should never flinch.” You will say “Ouch!” more than once in Postcards, while seeing Linh’s Buddha-like composure in your mind’s eye.
These vignettes of life in America, many first published at Unz.com, paid for via crowdfunding, recall Wim Wenders’ Road Movie Trilogy and Paris, Texas, meditations on the bizarro faux reality of postwar US, but laced with strychnine.
The US has served as the petri dish for capitalism in its purest form, built on the bones of the natives and slaves, carved in the marble of enlightenment thinking.
There was no looking back after 1776, unlike the French revolution in 1789, which exploded in its face early on and quickly moved back to constitutional monarchy, before its leap into communism a century later in 1871, and on to a humdrum welfare state a century after that.
The US staved off socialism til the 1930s, and by then, corporate ‘democracy’ proved itself powerful enough to keep it on its road to capitalist oblivion. Linh is no fan of 1776 and he makes his case in terrifying detail.
Linh is also an echo of New Orleans’ John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces (1963), the book’s title referring to an epigram from Jonathan Swift’s essay Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
This is fitting, as Linh is studiously ignored by the mainstream, much as Toole was. Fortunately, Linh has more social smarts,*** and much as he despises our electronic 1984, he was able to publish and self-fund via PayPal.
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