Early in Sarah Langan’s lively and satirical fifth novel, “A Better World,” a woman whose family has been handpicked to move to an idyllic small town begins to suspect that the place is too good to be true.
“It is too good to be true,” her husband agrees. “There’s always a catch.”
“But what is it?” she asks.
This is the question that propels the whole novel. It’s the same delicious, fable-like setup that has powered countless stories. Think of “The Stepford Wives” and more than a few episodes of “The Twilight Zone.”
The book is set several decades in the future, in an era plagued by environmental catastrophe, nuclear disaster and global conflict, among many other ills. But Plymouth Valley — an exclusive company town populated entirely by the most favored employees (and their families) of the BetterWorld corporation — is considered a refuge from all that ails the outside world. In Plymouth Valley, the toxic air is continuously scrubbed clean by a filter called (perhaps a bit too ominously) “the Bell Jar.” An on-site farm grows the kind of fresh produce that has disappeared from grocery stores elsewhere. And while the unemployment rate outside the town’s high walls is 25 percent, in Plymouth Valley, everyone lives in material comfort and without the use or need for money. “We think of PV as the last lifeboat,” one of the company’s top executives says.
For the members of the Farmer-Bowen family — Linda, Russell and their teenage twins, Hip and Josie — acceptance in Plymouth Valley through a job offer for Russell feels initially like an incredible piece of luck. But as Linda intuits from the start, something is amiss in their beautiful new town. The residents of Plymouth Valley turn out to be an insular bunch, bullying and excluding the Farmer-Bowens for mysterious reasons. And Linda and Russell soon begin to surmise that there’s a profoundly dark side to BetterWorld’s main product: a biodegradable polymer that has replaced plastic throughout the world and given the company a positive public relations glow.
Through a series of ominous encounters, the family gradually discovers what a deeply weird place Plymouth Valley is. The town members practice a set of traditions known collectively (again perhaps too obviously) as “Hollow,” which includes a series of secretive rituals that elevate selfishness and excess to the level of something like religion.
Part mystery, part social commentary, “A Better World” is cinematic and ambitious, though it might have benefited from a narrower focus. There are many targets of its satire: the enormous reach and power of corporations, the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, the absurdity of tech speak and company culture, traditional gender roles, faux spirituality, greenwashing and nationalism, to name just a few.
The novel’s most resonant critique is voiced by a man who lives just outside the walls of Plymouth Valley, and whose child has suffered gravely at the hands of the supposedly do-gooder BetterWorld corporation: “All they care about is how fast the food gets delivered and if their house is clean. Look at our town. They stole all the water. They brought the dust. They don’t care so long as they have their nannies and plumbers and hookers.”
This is the superpower of the people of Plymouth Valley but also their undoing: their extraordinary ability to ignore the suffering of others, even when — or especially when — they themselves are responsible for that suffering. In a way, this is the catch that Linda has sensed from the beginning.
As with any good satire, the real subject of this novel is not the morally bankrupt town of Plymouth Valley but our own culture, and how the most privileged among us so often ignore the misery of those outside our own walls. “A Better World” is a dark and unsettling mirror.
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