Last month Judith Schwartz sent me a copy of her novel Doublethink. I read very little fiction so the book soon got buried in my inbox. Something about Schwartz’s enthusiasm about how a book could change the political imagination and change the direction of the country stuck with me, though. I put Doublethink in my backpack, carried it around with me all over Berkeley, and I when I finally got a chance to relax in a coffee shop for a bit, I pulled it out.

Honestly, it was hard for me to get through the first few pages because the protagonist, Joe Winston, starts out with a political outlook that’s so different than my own. This was Schwartz’s intention: she draws a detailed, and respectful, portrait of how a neocon true believer sees the world. At the start of the novel, Joe has all the comforts and advantages of a politically-crafted elite, though his family troubles suggest cracks in the facade.

When Joe’s cushy job gets outsourced out from under him and a donation to a charity raises a red flag for Homeland Security, Joe discovers how tenuous his life of privilege really is. All the laws he supported in the name of family values and national security start to turn against him, and he finds himself on the outside of the gated communities that had been shielding him from the brutal world he helped create.

While Joe learns the ropes of this new world, he rediscovers the value of human dignity, and his growth as a human being enables him to heal some of the rifts in his family. However, now that Joe is aware of how the agenda of the elite has distorted the lives of everyone else, he finds the courage to take the necessary political action.

Schwartz’s book covers many issues of current political debate and imagines the dystopian outcome. I haven’t read a book like this since Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and a recommend it heartily for people who want to see what all the threads of the daily news would look like once woven into the tapestry of the future.