Cold, Like Minnesota (2019)
This book (novel-length, cleanly DIY printed, no page numbers, bound in construction paper, inside cover said 30 copies were printed) was dropped in my mailbox sometime in 2019 while the author was in progress of moving out of town. I’d enjoyed some of his other fiction before and there was some low-stakes exchange happening among us. Somehow, the 6 years went by before I made the decision to read this one all the way through. (I’m reading a lot more quickly these days–got a built-in study hall while I wait for the school bus to retrieve M.)
It’s a story about a neighborhood in Minneapolis which functions as something like an enclave of mutual aid, surrounded by other (to varying degrees, hostile) paradigms, close to 100 years in the future; presumably, 100 years of domestic unrest and war. A traveler arrives and integrates into the enclave. The near-exclusive focus is the enclave residents’ relationships, the social field as the tangible reflection of messy political structures.
When I hit him up to ask, the author said he hadn’t been writing much since finishing this piece in 2019, partly due to “current events somewhat overtaking what used to seem ‘fictional’.”
It is just a tiny bit fuzzily organized–there are a couple unclear continuity breaks and plot holes. But none of this is too disruptive because of how tightly the book sticks to its strengths. The flow of the social imagination is mostly so competent, so smoothly believable, that it generates its own momentum, gravity, consistency, and sets the pace. (It’s not a given that this can be pulled off in fiction, especially a DIY production presumably without much or any editor input.) The story flows best when fully digging into the real meat: forms of political power and experimental structures, their materiality and weaknesses, circulated among and digested through social imagination, the interpersonal, the affective flows among the women of the enclave.
I say women because you can almost count all the male characters on one hand: most of them are unnamed murder victims, a series of expendable bystanders or easily-neutralized antagonists. The only named male character we meet is the brother of a protagonist; he too mostly functions as atmosphere.
‘…You act like a fucking boy, Dellamya, you know that?’
‘Tell me what you mean.’ Dellamya says.
‘Helpless.’ Salwa says. ‘Fucking helpless.’
I can’t say it was a bad choice to not saddle this glimpse into a future timeline with the burdensome need to ‘include everything,’ deal with everything, every type of person. This way, the focus stays neat and lucid.
For all the gun violence, it’s still technically a Mary Sue narrative. Gina arrives on the scene–literally a scene, of squats and gray-area squats, coordinated by neighborhood housing councils and slowly-illuminated soft-power systems–and integrates successfully. Because she is competent and careful, she is loved and supported without ever hitting any real conflicts. Because she is strategic, she prospers, and so do her new friends. Ambient tensions arise but never destroy anything we care about. Gina herself never does anything fucked up (with any real stakes).
There are plenty of murders but there’s no sexual violence of any kind, not even in reference. This is the only real aspect of this future landscape that stretches credulity for me. Otherwise, it was a beautifully spooky read in 2025. Its light (but not too light) framing of surrounding context (of recovery after acute militarism, jerryrigged commercial logistics and “generation lockdown”) were graceful without being flippant. Characters thought around, and interacted with, these superstructures with about as much uneasy incoherence as we ourselves do.
Cars, guns, dogs, money, property, anxious processes of sussing out other people’s motivations and impulses, clashing ideological paradigms and their destructive effects on habitable environments: all these are familiar parts of the texture of precarious life, interdependence with other people. They’re juggled with a lot of fluency. I believe this can only come from already living within pieces of this future.
I haven’t read very many fiction works that talk about the network needed to constitute the mutual-aid-enclave. I would have a hard time visualizing, depicting it in this much detail myself. Its presence in the story is at times so faint that it can barely be confirmed, but so indispensible. It’s a sort of invisible junglegym that only some are climbing through, without knowing exactly why, and without being able to justify it coherently or comfortably.
What are these distant but definite connections that can’t be effectively named, can be evaluated only within the terms of their ambiguity, must somehow be counted on but can never be clearly measured? They’re certainly not ‘fair’ but are they ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Does it matter, if you need them to survive? How far do the networks extend? Where does their power falter? Everyone wonders, everyone inhabits the nervous uncertainty, but nobody has much choice other than to accept the network’s existence on its own unsatisfying terms. In this aspect, the text gives an accurate depiction of an already-existing scenario.
It’s presented as neither okay nor damning or whatever, that in this fictional future, the existence of these networks is not anywhere close to enough to reshape the world, the country, or even the whole city; its bounty (nothing crazy–just a very, very tenuous material stability via the availability of a modest social field) is bounded to the enclave. The fascist or fascist-inflected post-american chaos that is arriving is too large to be taken on at scale. One can be ashamed of these limitations (or not), but the fact remains: without other people, without dealing with them (uneasily, but still somehow finding a way) there is not even survival, and survival is at a certain point the most that can be hoped for. This fictional calculation rings uncomfortably plausible in 2025.
Arguably the visible onset of this timeline publicly declared itself and signified itself in our world less than a year from this novel’s printing–in, of all places, Minneapolis. So I can understand wanting to stop writing fiction.
