It has been said that you can judge society by how it treats its young, its poor, and its elderly. If this is true, Jessica Bruder’s beautifully written, but thoroughly depressing book Nomadland suggests we are failing on at least two of these counts. Bruder, a freelance journalist, embedded herself with a niche group of (mostly) older Americans - van dwellers - people who are living on the margins of a society that has either discarded them or who have been the victims of capitalism’s twists of fate (the common thread among many is lost jobs and/or homes after the 2008 housing crash) and landed in mobile homes of all shapes, sizes, and functionality as they scrape together an existence through menial labor, modest Social Security checks, and the kindness of others.
In its way, Nomadland is a modern mash-up of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. On the one hand, the book is a meditation on the forces shaping our economy. Two companies in particular - Amazon and Wal-Mart - loom large over the story. The former, as a temporary employer of senior citizens willing to work long hours for modest pay hoping their bodies can withstand the punishing toll walking concrete floors and the bitter cold nights they work in remote warehouses take on them. The latter is a one-stop shop for their daily (and emergency) needs as well as a sort-of benign temporary landlord that typically looks the other way at RV and van dwellers who utilize their parking lots as overnight shelters.
On the other hand, as itinerants who must hustle across hundreds of miles from job site to job site, these vagabonds are very much living a life that would look familiar to the Depression-era families Steinbeck wrote about. In documenting the daily struggles of these decent people, Kruder finds far more compassion among them than society offers in return. Imagine yourself in your late sixties being asked to work a twelve-hour shift in a beet processing plant in North Dakota as winter bears down on the Plains, or living in a 100 square foot camper in Nevada while the temperature outside plunges below zero and your shift at a warehouse processing plant starts in just a few hours.
These common deprivations (and depredations) litter Kruder’s narrative, but in sharing their stories, the people she speaks with do not ask for pity or even understanding. They are a prideful sort who have leveraged modern technology to jerry-rig their temporary homes into solar-powered power stations while frugality leads them across the Mexican border for lower-cost dental care.
Of course, Bruder does not attempt to sugar coat the lifestyle. If anything, readers will be called to ask what Nomadland says about a society that has accepted that this is the way some people are living out their final years. What tradeoffs have we made in service of on-demand Amazon “prime” delivery? How is it that economic policy says we cannot afford a more robust safety net that might have rescued some of these people from living out of a van but can afford to hand people who already possess most of the nation’s wealth even more of it? These are not questions Bruder attempts to answer, but I do not think she has to - her narrative speaks for itself.
And lest anyone think Bruder was a mere “tourist,” she was quite the opposite. She not only spent months living in her own van, but worked the modern-day McJobs of warehouse employee and seasonal vegetable picker that taxed her (far younger) body in ways that made her appreciate how people twice her age were able to do it year in and year out. She traveled extensively with the subjects she writes about, documenting their ups and downs, their struggles, and hopes and dreams (by the end of the book, one of the main characters in the book has actually purchased undeveloped property deep in the Arizona desert with hopes of building a modest home and permanent place for her and her friends to live). Nomadland is a tour de force for the type of deeply reported, clear-eyed and thought-provoking reporting that stays with you long after you finish it.
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