The kernel that became “Anthem” started leaking about five years ago. Hawley had published his previous novel “Before the Fall” with Hachette, and Michael Beach, the company’s CEO, was eager to score it in another novel. Hawley’s editor had just left the company, so Beach offered to edit the book himself.
“You could do worse than the guy who edited Infinite Jest,” Hawley said of Beach.
During the summer of 2019, Hawley was planning to work on the book during a two-month family vacation in Europe. In a London bookstore, he amassed a pile of novels that were his “eureka moments,” he said, including the “New York Trilogy” by Paul Auster; “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera; “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez; and “Song of Songs” by Toni Morrison.
“And now you’re walking around with a box of books, and you’re like, Why didn’t I just buy two books?” “But I was embarrassed to have them all.”
Anthem is woven together using a number of contemporary threads, mostly seen through the eyes of teens struggling to save themselves and each other. Simon, one of the main characters, is a descendant of a pharmaceutical fortune made by selling opiates. A culture war descends into armed conflict, in a way that looks like it should have been a January 6 commotion—except that Hawley wrote it last October.
“One of the ideas explored in the book is what unites us now when there are so many things that are tearing us apart,” Beach said. “Imagine being a child, hearing the oceans dying, the bees dying, reading about the opioid epidemic, seeing these political battles, reading about sexual predation. That feeling that the world you grow in is being destroyed before your eyes, and what would it be there for you? How should it be? That be it, and what can you do?”
The book is cinematic and fictional at times. A rebel points his gun at one of the protagonists and says, “There is no god,” and then a missile explodes behind him. Amazon’s Witch Truck magically supplies materials to meet the needs of our heroes, whether it’s to tie an opponent or sew a wound.
“The magical realism of the book,” said Hawley, “was a relief, because magical realism has a way of making ugly things beautiful. Think of the Marquis and One Hundred Years of Solitude, the amount of tragedy in this book offset by the whim and beauty of not knowing what might happen next.” “.