REVIEW: BLOODBATH NATION

I'm not sure how many people will read Bloodbath Nation, Paul Auster's survey of the gun epidemic in the US. The author himself admits he was not necessarily thrilled to be wading into the "gunk and gore and horror of that violence."

Gun violence, like climate change, is the sort of miserable fact of our reality that turns most people off from the news and is certainly not a topic many elect to read about--at least outside of fiction. We know it's profoundly terrible, and know that any fruit of change usually withers shortly after whatever massacre-specific uproar, so what good is dwelling upon any of it? Over time, reactions vary from overwhelmed, to innurred, to disinterested.

Auster's essays, which build from his personal histories with guns, to the historic, to the statistical, are interspersed with photos by Spencer Ostrander. Over two years, Ostrander travelled the country to photograph the sites of over thirty mass shootings. As Auster writes in his Author's Note, "They are portraits of buildings, often bleak, ugly buildings in undistinctive, neutral American landscapes, forgotten structures where horrendous massacres were carried out by men with rifles and guns, briefly captured the country's attention and then fading into oblivion."

Drab, banal buildings. Malls, high schools, places of worship, the work places. Places so ubiquitous that they are in some ways invisible. Places where the most normal things happened until the worst thing happened. The pictures, captioned with their new, tragic context, force the viewer to see the buildings, to consider their being all at once unremarkable and remarkable. The thing people would prefer to look away from is inescapable. The text in Bloodbath Nation serves much the same purpose.

Auster locates the present situation in two primary historical points: The US's colonial past and the Black Panther movement. The former established a sense within the national identity that treated gun ownership not only as a right, but as a civic duty, while the latter supercharged the iniquities at the heart of who does and doesn't get to enjoy the country's self-evident rights.

"This is a country that was born in violence," Auster writes, "but also born with a past, one hundred and eighty years of prehistory that were lived in a state of continual war with the inhabitants of the land we appropriated and continual acts of oppression against our enslaved minority--the two sins we carried into the Revolution and have not atoned for since."

The debate over the presence and role of guns within the US has been going on for so long, and with so little effect, that, like the buildings photographed by Ostrander, it's become commonplace, invisible. In Bloodbath Nation, Auster works to rise above the tired palaver and recontextualize the arguments, locates the deadlock in a contradiction at the heart of the capitalist-based American Experiment: to what extent can and should the rights of the individual continue to trump the well-being of the whole?

The horror of gun violence that most would rather not hear or read about is a consequence of a deeper, more stubborn stain on that nation to the south of us--a nation exerting ever greater influence on our own fragile sense of Canadian identity--that simply cannot be looked away from.