An amusing young romance intersects with an underground freedom movement in a Soviet-style system that promised egalitarian utopia but devolved into a police state.
Izzy, an attractive college senior, belongs to an underground freedom movement organizing against a repressive, yet poorly run, Marxist regime. She is challenged by the idea of recruiting Tom, an unlikely choice as a rising young star in the Party. But Izzy heard Tom may have hidden depths and could get inside information as an underground mole. He’s also nice looking.
Will their amusing and cautious interactions and gradual revelations develop into a deeper relationship of shared beliefs? Will increasing friction between the two marginally competent Party leaders finally provide an opportunity for the underground to take action? Will Tom be reunited with his capitalist parents whom he denounced as a child, and who are in a massive gulag prison camp?
The interwoven storylines are carefully paced. Appealing characters and background events develop with engaging and humorous dialogues and narratives, cultural and political satire, and serious commentary. Then events unfold with surprising twists and thriller scenes.
Book Club Questions Included. Clean romance and romantic comedy, political humor and satire, political intrigue and thriller, literary.
Tom was twenty-two and a member of the Socialist Utopia Party. He was near the end of his senior year of college and had a job set in the Chicago office of the Bureau of Equity. Tom figured he’d take the train downtown while continuing to live in the rent-controlled high rise near the Evanston campus where he’d been for the last few years. He felt at home in Evanston, a progressive college town with an eclectic urban feel. Just across the northern boundary of Chicago along Lake Michigan, Evanston felt more like an extension of the city than a suburb.
Tom was more than just a member of the Party. He was a rising star. It seemed so easy. You just volunteered for everything. Tom had spending money through a scholarship stipend and high social credit score. He had spent his middle and high school years in the Party’s prestigious Boarding School System. He had been in the Cadet Corps and then the Youth Brigades. Tom had medals, ribbons and badges for social media posts, recruiting activities, litter patrol, wetlands restoration, karate, marksmanship, composing patriotic socialist songs and leading patriotic socialist marches.
He was now sitting in his usual place in the front row of Modern European History for the final exam, his last college exam ever. He figured he’d ace it. He finished the exam early but waited until the end of the allotted time and kept checking his work. He didn’t want to be over-confident and blow his perfect A grade point average.
Tom was euphoric when the exam session ended. He wandered toward the long line for free coffee at one of the ubiquitous Utopia Cafés near campus. The drizzle had stopped and he felt okay with the chilly air in his light windbreaker.
While standing in line, Tom was thinking about what he’d do during the break before starting his new job. He eventually looked around and noticed the girl behind him.
“Did you know these coffee shops used to be owned by capitalists and they charged really high prices?” Tom asked casually with a light smile, though he cringed inside at the dumb opening line.
“Yeah, we learned that in first grade when we began drinking coffee,” she said, while smiling just slightly at his awkward attempt to make small talk.
“So, do you come here often?” Tom asked, feeling embarrassed again about his banter skills.
“Not really. These lines are crazy,” she said quietly.
“Where do you like to go for coffee then?” Tom asked.
“I often just make it myself. It’s not hard. You should try it.” She was smiling.
“There’s no other coffee place you like around here?” Tom asked.
“When I hear about a good coffee place, it ends up closing. Maybe I’m bad luck.”
“I know a place that’s still open and has great coffee. Mojo’s. They have some connection to New Zealand,” Tom said.
“New Zealanders have good taste in coffee. I used to go out with a guy in London who spent time in New Zealand. He drank coffee all day long and couldn’t sleep.”
“Is that why you left him? He drank too much coffee?” Tom was smiling and flirting.
“One of the reasons,” she said with a slight smile. “But how did you know I left him instead of him leaving me?” She was flirting back.
“I just met you, so I can’t say for sure, but I doubt if anyone would leave you.” Tom wasn’t sure how she’d react but hoped for the best.
She was smiling calmly and making eye contact but didn’t say anything. She was attracted, amused, and wanted to see what he’d come up with next.
“Okay, sorry, that probably seemed like a pick-up line. But, uh, I like your smile.”
Tom had been rejected by pretty girls who viewed situations like this as a pick-up, so he had tried to develop a sense for when a girl was interested. The girl standing next to him seemed interested, but it didn’t make sense for her not to be attached. Maybe she had high standards. Maybe she was spoiled or hard to get along with. Tom wanted to find out.
“Did you notice the coffee here is getting even weaker?” she whispered.
“Maybe,” Tom said quietly.
“The workers are gradually making it weaker,” she said, this time close to Tom’s ear. Her warm breath felt good.
“Why would they do that and how would you know?” Tom whispered close to her ear and picked up the scent of her shampoo.
“The workers are mad that management took away the tip jars. You know, for equality, since office workers don’t have tip jars. It’s another new rule. I heard someone say this in the back of class.”
“How does making weaker coffee get back at management?”
“It doesn’t. They couldn’t figure out how to get back at management. So they decided that weaker coffee would make their own jobs easier. They won’t have to open and grind as many bags, and they’ll have fewer customers to handle because fewer people will want the weaker coffee. They think that’s fair since they don’t get tips anymore.”
They reached the free coffee take-out window and asked for coffee without anything added and stood together quietly for a moment.
“Would you, uh, like to meet at Mojo’s for some really good coffee sometime?” Tom asked.
“Sure.”
“By the way, my name is Tom.”
“I’m Izzy.”
They smiled and shook hands and made plans to meet the next morning. They headed off in different directions holding their cups of free coffee.
Tom thought about Izzy as he walked over to the lake. She reminded him of an actress named Hedy Lamarr in a 1941 movie called “Come Live with Me,” a romantic comedy with Jimmy Stewart. Tom had been taken with Hedy and learned that she worked on scientific inventions as a hobby. It wasn’t that Izzy looked exactly like Hedy Lamarr. The resemblance to Hedy involved something else about Izzy’s personality, her calm poise and quiet playfulness.
A chilly wind whipped in gusts around Tom. He wondered if he was projecting onto Izzy some qualities that didn’t exist. He’d done that before. He doubted that Izzy worked on scientific inventions as a hobby like Hedy Lamarr. He doubted that Hedy Lamarr was the same in real life as her characters in movies. He took the last sip which was now bitter with coffee grounds that had slipped through the cheap filters. He thought about how the Utopia Cafés were going downhill as he tossed the cup in a trash barrel and headed toward his apartment building. All the same utilitarian design, the accent aigu on Café seemed odd, perhaps the work of an apparatchik with a sense of humor.
When Tom got back to his place, he turned on his laptop to spend time on an anonymized search of the internet, including dark web sites, for any new clues to the location and condition of his parents. He knew they were in the last major roundup of unrepentant capitalist deplorables who were taken to the Alaskan Reserve, a secretive massive gulag prison camp, nine years ago. When Tom took a break for lunch, he turned on the Equality News channel. The newscaster was repeating a story about someone who got the most social credits last week. Tom knew the report would segue into the person who got the most demerits. He turned off the news and continued his internet search.
After listening to some music and going to bed early, Tom lay awake thinking back to his early years.
The Party had set up the Boarding School System to select and train the smartest kids for future leadership roles and give their parents a break from child-rearing duties that trained professionals could handle better. Tom had felt honored to be selected when he was ten and picked up with other kids and transported in a yellow school bus to a middle school facility about 200 miles away in Ann Arbor. Tom and the other kids were too young to question why they had to go so far, and they also sort of liked the idea. Their parents had mixed reactions to the departures, hugging and crying and saying they’d miss them, while also saying the kids would benefit in the long run with better credentials and career opportunities.
Tom’s political instructors had taught the kids to cherish the progressive socialist movement’s beginnings long ago among forward-thinking grad students and faculty members. The inspiring dreams of building an egalitarian utopia with everyone striving for the collective good, of smashing the power structures of capitalism and so-called “democratic” governing institutions which perpetuated worker oppression and racial inequity.
Each college graduating class, year after year, had brought the movement’s ideas and values to other universities as grad students, or to educational publishers, non-profits and think tanks, teachers’ unions and government workers’ unions, kindergartens and grammar schools, mainstream media, government leaders and staffers for the old liberal party, and eventually all levels of the business world with new generations of enlightened leaders during decades of growth.
The progressive socialist movement eventually obtained control of the federal government and most state governments. The leaders then adopted a modern constitution with wonderfully aspirational goals. Free college, healthcare and daycare. True racial equity and social justice. No more unemployment. Guarantied jobs with living wages. Open borders with no restrictions and quick citizenship. Shorter workweeks and no more overtime. No more climate change of any kind. Like other Marxist-Leninist systems, the new constitution vested all political authority in the then dominant party, which the leaders rebranded as the “Socialist Utopia Party.” Any opposition party might have reactionary conservatives and obstruct progress with a lot of bickering over egos and nonsense. The Party and its elite group of ideologues and intelligentsia leaders could figure things out.
The leaders also changed the country’s name, which had taken on some negative associations, to the “Republic of Equality.” The word “Republic” wasn’t accurate, but the Party liked the way it sounded, reminiscent of the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).” And indeed, though most people thought the country would be like Sweden, it devolved into a blend of Soviet Russia with the best ideas from Cuba and Venezuela. The Party’s academic purists insisted that Soviet Russia had been the right idea, only at the wrong time and place. Lenin and Stalin had some flaws, but the modern Marxist masterminds had no ego problems or human foibles of any kind at all. In any event, they fervently believed the Party must own and run the “means of production” - most companies and enterprises - to purge capitalist oppression, institutional racism and inequity, and instill a collectivist mindset over materialistic individualism.
The purists rejected the China model which had drifted into hybrid capitalism and petty bourgeois consumerism. The purists also rejected “democratic socialism” as inherently impossible - an oxymoron - doomed to fail. People in a democracy would eventually complain and vote to reverse true socialism as they had in Sweden. The Party’s initial capitalist take-over targets included the news and media companies, big tech companies, grocery store chains, housing developers and apartment companies, steel mills and mining companies, trains, airlines and energy companies.
On a practical level, the Party’s Central Committee emerged as the only real power in the country. They could decide who could be in the Party and who could be kicked out. All candidates had to be Party members, hand-picked or approved by the Central Committee, and could be removed by the Central Committee at any time.
Most people had felt exhilarated by the historic changes, the gushing news reporting and commentary, inspiring interviews of people celebrating on the streets and addressing each other with the egalitarian term “comrade,” uplifting socialist slogans, socialist parades, socialist-oriented television and streaming programs, and enormous banners depicting Chairman Alex Stalinsky with a proud expression and upraised fist. Everyone liked the change from “white” to “European American” and then to “Euro” for short. “White” had taken on so many negative associations that it had become a racial slur.
Yet, over time, most people found themselves sinking into cynicism and poverty amid cultural dullness, a poorly managed plunging economy, confiscatory taxes, high inflation, increasing power outages, shortages of goods and services, and long waitlists for free college, day care and health care. At the same time, the elite socialist political class never had to wait, and lived higher than ever in gated communities with large homes, new cars, access to special stores and parties. People began to grumble openly despite the Party’s promise of better results with a new Five Year Plan. Some brave souls began to discuss old conservative values and ideas like free enterprise, free speech, and freely elected government representatives.
Chairman Stalinsky, fervently believing the Party only needed more time to produce utopia, had then followed the model of other Marxist-Leninist regimes. He created a huge national Political Police force to suppress reactionary subversion. The Political Police included uniformed enforcers and secret undercover agents. They worked partly through Cyber Command’s computer programs to monitor and control social media posts, and partly through a huge network of volunteer Block Minders who earned rewards by informing on neighborhood subversives. The Political Police and Block Minders also enforced new Hate Speech Laws, Crimes of Disinformation, and Crimes of Domestic Terrorism. These crimes were defined so broadly they could cover anything you said or did that the Party didn’t like.
Yet Stalinsky’s original goal for the Political Police turned out to be overly ambitious in seeking to suppress both subversive speech or actions and private cynicism. It became evident over time that private cynicism could never be suppressed, and that allowing private cynicism actually had a benefit of releasing frustrations as long as it didn’t cross the line into subversion. Because that line was so vague, people began speaking quietly and whispering in public. When people caught themselves speaking louder, they threw in socialist slogans.
Though few knew the extent, a surprising number of people formed a subversive underground organization which still stubbornly idealized the country’s original freedoms and the old founding documents - those hateful ancient relics which failed to recognize the benevolence of totalitarian socialist control with the best self-appointed masterminds making decisions for the silly ignorant masses. Even without a quota system, the underground was well diversified among races, classes and backgrounds, and included moderate liberals along with many libertarians and conservatives. The Party hated the underground’s subversive goals and hated the underground’s ability to achieve diversity without quota mandates even more.
The underground movement became a prime target of the Political Police and Block Minders.