2 A.M. in Little America

By: Ken Kalfus

Narrated by: BJ Harrison

Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

From "an important writer in every sense" (David Foster Wallace), a novel that imagines a future in which sweeping civil conflict has forced America's young people to flee its borders, into an unwelcoming world.

One such American is Ron Patterson, who finds himself on distant shores, working as a repairman and sharing a room with other refugees. In an unnamed city wedged between ocean and lush mountainous forest, Ron can almost imagine a stable life for himself. Especially when he makes the first friend he has had in years—a mysterious migrant named Marlise, who bears a striking resemblance to a onetime classmate.

Nearly a decade later—after anti-migrant sentiment has put their whirlwind intimacy and asylum to an end—Ron is living in "Little America," an enclave of migrants in one of the few countries still willing to accept them. Here, among reminders of his past life, he again begins to feel that he may have found a home. Ron adopts a dog, observes his neighbors, and lands a repairman job that allows him to move through the city quietly. But this newfound security is quickly jeopardized, as resurgent political divisions threaten the fabric of Little America. Tapped as an informant against the rise of militant gangs and contending with the appearance of a strangely familiar woman, Ron is suddenly on dangerous and uncertain ground.

©2022 Ken Kalfus (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Promising premise, boring execution

This book is as dull and uninteresting as the protagonist, a minimum wage electronics technician who trudges through his broken, dull, and joyless life. Author has a few interesting ideas and premises, and I kept hoping that he would do something with them, but we just kept plodding along until the book ended with an easy out whimper. Very disappointing after making the effort to listen to the whole thing. Maybe, at best, he captures the misery of war refugees, and by making the protagonist a lost American, opens that world to American readers. Author goes out of his way to keep the story and character's ideologies obscure and he tries too hard to keep the 'good people on both sides' notion alive.

It is also annoying that the author hints that the protagonist has Prosopagnosia (face blindness) and that that partly explains his confusion and social isolation, but he does a poor job of confirming and/or explaining the character's disability. The protagonist uses the word Prosopagnosia a few times. I know quite a lot about Prosopagnosia and still I could not put the pieces together.

More personal than political

My interest in the book was disappointed as the political angle was generic and detached. The diction is unrealistically elitist and the tone and the tone inappropriate for the subject matter.