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Books of The Times

In a New Dystopian Novel, the Country is AutoAmerica, but Baseball Is Still Its Pastime

Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

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The best thing about being God, Iris Murdoch wrote, would be making the heads. The best thing about writing speculative or dystopian fiction, surely, is updating human language, pushing strange new words into a reader’s mind.

Gish Jen’s densely imagined if static new novel, “The Resisters,” is set in a future surveillance state known as AutoAmerica. The ice caps have melted, and much of the land is underwater. A racial and class divide has cleaved the population.

The “Netted” have jobs, plush amenities and well-zoned houses on dry land. The “Surplus,” most of whom live on houseboats in “Flotsam Towns,” have scratchy blankets, thought control and degradation. Members of this underclass have not begun to grow gills, like the buff men and women in Kevin Costner’s “Waterworld,” but that may not be far off.

Much of the futuristic language Jen deploys, her portmanteaus, reflects the banality of both corporate uplift (“SpritzGrams,” “WrinkErase”) and state-sponsored evil: “EnforceBots,” “ToeBombs,” “AutoWar.” There’s been an anti-immigration push called “Ship’EmBack.” There is “Total Persuasion Architecture.” I could have used a few more paragraphs about “EgoShrink,” “HomoUpgrade” and “GonadWrap.”

Into this totalitarian landscape, like a flower slipped into the barrel of a rifle, Jen inserts an almost old-fashioned baseball novel. We meet Gwen, a young southpaw with long fingers and hair dyed the color of a David Hockney swimming pool. She redoes her ponytail on the mound between pitches before launching her blistering fastball and her spookily precise off-speed stuff. Her slider and curveball combination — her slurve — is a killer.

Her family is a Surplus family, unwanted biology, in part because they are of mixed race. We’re in an era of “the New Segregation.” The Netted are “flaxenfair,” as white as polar bears, as blond as rapture children.

This novel’s narrator is Gwen’s father, Grant. He’s a former teacher. His wife, Eleanor, is a lawyer who has previously been jailed for her advocacy work on behalf of Surplus families. They’re crunchy. They grow their own vegetables, refusing to eat the enervating state-supplied food. They read and knit. They’re wavy Ed Koren characters in a steely “Matrix” universe.

Grant knows Gwen is special by the time she’s a toddler. She grows a bit older and he watches her “throw an apple smack into the mouth of a Halloween scarecrow from clear across a field.” She’s so fluid on the mound that she seems to have a double-jointed back. Her coach praises her dorsiflexion.

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Gish Jen, whose new novel is “The Resisters.”Credit...Basso Cannarsa

The Surplus are only allowed to play on certain designated (and frightening) fields, but Gwen’s clandestine league ignores that rule. The name of the organization, Aunt Nellie’s All-Star Resistance League, or the Resisters, supplies the novel’s title.

Word gets out about her talent. When coed baseball becomes a new Olympic sport, she’s wanted in the Netted world. AutoAmerica needs to defeat ChinRussia. This is her chance to cross over to the plush world with her family. Will she?

Jen, whose previous novels include “Mona in the Promised Land” and “World and Town,” is a wonderfully gifted writer. But “The Resisters” is not among her best novels; it never sinks its hooks into the reader.

In part, this is because we have dystopian novel overload, a condition Jill Lepore diagnosed in The New Yorker a few years ago. In part, too, it’s because Jen exerts so much effort constructing her world, this book’s hardware, that the human software is underdeveloped. There’s not a lot of human juice here, those micro-pleasures of perception that fill much of her earlier fiction; there’s merely a rolling scenario.

Jen writes herself into a corner at times. During one long section of the novel, Gwen crosses over and attends a Netted college while playing for its baseball team. Obviously her father can’t go with her. How to keep tabs on this novel’s most important character when its narrator is left behind? Grant decides to bug her room, to listen to her conversations. That’s one way inside. But it’s hard to imagine behavior that so absolutely cuts against the grain of this family’s politics. It’s like watching Victor Navasky name names.

Once in a while, this novel opens a small box of dread. But there’s a tameness here, too. You know there’s going to be a big game at the end. You sense that, within certain limits, everything is going to be okay. To borrow imagery from a less literary sport, you feel that this novel’s bowling lane has bumper rails.

There are moments in “The Resisters” that remind you what an extremely fine writer Jen is. Grant watches a “SkyCar” descend into its charging shed:

“Was not the billowing of the SkyCar’s luminescent wings astonishing? Or what about the landing gear that bent at the ankles so that the vehicle could descend, not parallel to the ground, but at a 45-degree angle? How Leonardo da Vinci would have loved this thing, I thought, as the machine reached out its wheels like a hawk about to snatch a vole with its claws.”

Jen’s sparkling wit has not entirely been put aside. One torment, for the Surplus, is a neighborhood filled with Canada geese — “the pitbulls, one might say, of the waddling world.”

In his authoritative biography of Henry Aaron, Howard Bryant wrote: “Hitting, it could be argued, represented the first meritocracy in Henry’s life.” Jen’s novel has plenty to say about race and class and the search for a level playing field. The trouble is that “The Resisters” is too easy to resist.

Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner.

The Resisters
By Gish Jen
301 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Trouble With the Slurve. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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