Given that this book begins on November 23 of this year and concludes on January 20, 2025, it’s possible to consider it a work of science fiction. All of the action takes place in the future. But like all science fiction, it was written in the past. Science fiction writer Frederick Pohl suggested that science fiction writers don’t predict the car, they predict the traffic jam. In that sense, The Last Election, by Andrew Yang and Stephen Marche is certainly science fiction, taking current American politics and describing with high tension, insider knowledge and literary finesse, a traffic jam of apocalyptic proportions. We can be glad – we’re living in an excellent novel.
Andrew Yang was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries and is co-chair of The Forward Party, which seeks to become a viable third party. Stephen Marche is an essayist and writer, whose latest book is The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future. Their novel is chock-a-block with upsetting events, political and personal, for the protagonists, Mikey Ricci, a political operative who becomes the campaign manager for a truly idealistic third-party candidate. Martha Kass is a good journalist exiled as the manager at the anonymous tip line for the New York Times. She is handed the tip of a lifetime. Optimists, beware.
There’s a large gallery of excellent characters surrounding them, some venal (enjoyably so), some realistic idealists (not an oxymoron in this novel), and a lot of pragmatic workaholics. Marche and Yang write seamlessly, though readers may think the political campaign insider actions are informed by Yang and the press insider chaos by Marche. That said, the book absolutely works as a can’t-turn-the-pages-fast-enough thriller. Happily, the tension is carefully crafted, and the sentences are often memorably fine. If it weren’t for the “This is the end, my friend” theme and the apocalyptic (political) traffic jam, they’d set this out with the literary novels. But Yang and Marche are definitely not decaf. On one hand, every reader will have their own reaction to The Last Election, likely dictated by your politics, or lack thereof. But no matter what you believe, you will find this is an excellent novel. The writing is there, the ideas are there – and you are here.
Andrew Yang and Stephen Marche have written a pulse-pounding, page turning thriller, but they’ve also crafted an excellent, elegant novel. Let’s hope it stays in our imagination! You can hear their thoughts on this and the idea of predicting the present at this link, or listen below (and alone, assuming you’re not being listened to…)
Narrative Species 