Details bog down dystopian doorstopper

Veteran U.S. author and journalist Kurt Andersen throws everything but the kitchen sink into this doorstopper of a novel set in a 21st-century America ripped apart by civil war.

Unfortunately, Andersen’s reach exceeds his grasp. With more than 550 pages of literary allusions, political predictions, scientific erudition, domestic melodrama and inside-the-Beltway jokes, The Breakup offers many amusing moments.

But it threatens sensory overload and you don’t really care about the fates of its smarty-pants characters. It will strain the patience of all but the most dedicated observers of what it labels “the inevitable American apocalypse.”

The year is 2045, less than a generation into the future. A husband and wife of 23 years, Asher and Natalie Zimbalist, have been separated for six months.

A senior executive at a tech-billionaire-owned research institute, Asher is living in San Francisco with the younger of their two kids. Natalie, an acclaimed poet and author, has returned to her childhood home in small-town Tennessee.

Politics and culture play into the couple’s marital discord. He is a Jewish liberal, she the daughter of right-wing Cuban immigrants, with Catholic tendencies.

Natalie is even an NRA supporter, to Asher’s disquiet. As per Anton Chekhov’s famous theatrical dictum, a handgun introduced in the novel’s first act must be fired in the third.

Meanwhile, Asher and Natalie’s personal problems are writ large in their native land. The venom of early 21st-century U.S. politics came to a head 2036 with two years of terrorist violence, murder and civil war.

(So many refugees fled north that Canada had to suspend their entry.)

After official “Disunion” in 2044, 12 former red states have become the “Free American Republic.” Cities throughout the heartland have been allowed to hold referendums to determine their national allegiances.

“It has been a slow roll,” as Asher observes.

Slow, indeed. Andersen takes 300 pages — the length of an average literary novel today — to relate The Breakup’s richly detailed backstory.

Included is a sociology course of secondary ideas. Among them: the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence (exponential); the state of climate change (not dire, because of new carbon capture technology); research into animal-human communication (turtles can talk, apparently); and attitudes toward gender fluidity among Generation Beta (less militant than today’s, thankfully).

Until this point, the battling spouses narrate in alternating chapters, with the additional points of view of one of their so-called friends, some news reports and, oddly, the talking turtles.

Then the action switches gears. The couple take their 17-year-old on a car trip through their divided land on a college-admissions tour. Imagine Catherine Lacey crossed with Don DeLillo. The earth quakes, literally.

Andersen’s ambition cannot be overstated. With his long and impressive background in magazine journalism, film production and political non-fiction, he is, at age 72, taking one last swing for the fences.

His use of speculative fiction recalls everyone from Margaret Atwood to Thomas Pynchon. He uses footnotes à la David Foster Wallace.

The best parts, by far, are the invented fates of public figures. Donald Trump dies at age 89 “of a massive brain stem stroke while on the famous escalator to a 20th anniversary celebration of his first presidential candidacy.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the current U.S. president. Tech billionaire Elon Musk “overdosed en route to Mars.” A prominent Fox News anchor is “Arabella Kushner,” whom a Google search identifies, fittingly, as the real-life daughter of the Jared K. and Ivanka T.

Andersen has poured all he has learned in 50 years as an observer of the American comedy into The Breakup. But he defies the No. 1 rule of fiction: “Show, don’t tell.”

This novel, alas, is all “tell.” And too often it shows.

Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.