The Revolution of Every Day
By Cari Luna
392 pages;
Tin House Books
Is access to housing a basic human right? The characters in this debut
novel, a group of starry-eyed idealists, certainly believe so. They take over an
abandoned building and spend their days scavenging dumpsters for the items
discarded by a rising tide of yuppies in order to fix the crumbling
infrastructure. When one of the newest arrivals, a wayward former junkie named
Amelia, becomes pregnant by a married man in the building, lives become
insidiously entangled—and surprisingly upsetting drama ensues. Author
Cari Luna pits the residents' personal struggles against the larger backdrop of
historical events in New York in the 1990s, when the city tried to evict the
squatters to put in condo developments. But this is not a story of good versus
evil: Luna shows how youthful dreams and a life lived just above the poverty
line can ossify into something heart-breaking. "They've been so busy
surviving they haven't noticed their lives hardening around them, fixing them
into place," she writes about the oldest residents. "They are now all they're ever going to be." In the
end, the novel examines how years of fighting for what you believe in both
devastates and transforms, as each of these characters struggles to find a
place to call home.
— Andrea Walker