LSE lit fest 2016 book review: you don’t have to live like this by Benjamin Markovits

In You Don’t Have to Live Like This, a novel by Benjamin Markovits, disenchanted academic Greg Marnier is given the opportunity to participate in a regeneration project focused on several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit. As Marnier finds himself torn between the racial and class tensions that the gentrification experiment exacerbates, Markovits’s novel offers a timely engagement with issues facing the USA post-financial crisis. However, while the book is relatable and highly readable, it fails to probe as deeply into the overarching socioeconomic conditions of the US Rust Belt as Maria Zhivitskaya would have hoped.