In this vision of a dystopian future, a Jewish student on the run learns that artists make the best fascists
In Zachary C. Solomon’s debut novel, a young man joins a utopian society hoping to prove himself as an architect — but soon learns he’s the subject of a sinister experiment
“A Brutal Design” is Solomon’s first novel. Photo by Lanternfish Press, Eileen Meny
By Irene Katz Connelly February 21, 2024
A Brutal Design
By Zachary C. Solomon
Lanternfish Press, 256 pages, $19
A couple days into his stay in Duma, a socialist utopia that is actually anything but, Samuel Zelnik walks into the desert and finds a concentration camp guard’s office.
Well, not a real one. The shack Samuel encounters, which features period furniture, a corkboard map of different prison cells and not-so-subtle personal effects including a pair of swastika cufflinks, is actually a facsimile of the real thing, created as a memorial by Miriana Granoff, an artist Samuel studied under in college. Samuel, who practically worships Miriana for her ostensible leftist ideals, initially believes that the memorial’s purpose is to expose the banality of Nazi evil by studying its quotidian manifestations a la The Zone of Interest (although whatever world this protagonist inhabits, it’s not the one in which Jonathan Glazer’s film is racking up Oscar nominations).
But he eventually discovers the artwork to be more of an Ozymandias, a sincere tribute to authoritarian power which, though vanquished once, might very well rise again. The story of Samuel’s disillusionment, and Miriana’s drastic change in loyalties, is the stuff of A Brutal Design, a debut novel from American author Zachary C. Solomon offering a deeply pessimistic take on the uses of art under authoritarianism.
A semi-satirical, semi-fantastical novel, A Brutal Design follows Samuel, a high-minded but naive Jewish architecture student from an unnamed country that, after a decades-long slide to the right, has slipped into full-throated fascism. As a child, Samuel sees his parents burned to death in their synagogue by vigilantes. In college, where he allies himself with leftist movements led by Miriana, he barely survives a shooting attack on members of the student newspaper. After fascists take over the country’s government, Samuel faces a choice: deportation to a gulag or deportation to Duma, an experimental “worker’s paradise” where he can put into practice the ideals he’s embraced from a distance.
Let’s put aside Samuel’s somewhat misguided belief that a fascist government is sponsoring a costly experiment in socialist self-government. He’s been through a lot. His most immediate problem is that he doesn’t actually live in a worker’s paradise — at least not as a worker. Arriving in Duma with high hopes of contributing to the city’s modernist architecture, he’s incensed to find himself relegated to manual labor in a factory that manufactures metal parts with no discernible use. And as a would-be builder with a keen eye for the structures around him, he can tell pretty quickly that Duma isn’t living up to its ideals: After all, a true worker’s paradise wouldn’t confine the masses to (of course) Brutalist dormitories while blessing leadership with funky modular homes and gardens.
One such member of leadership is Miriana herself, who befriends Samuel and promises to find him a plum academic job if he helps her out with a few tasks — like spying on his neighbors and narcing on the distributors of illicit pamphlets. From these requests, the reader can discern quickly that Miriana is no longer the anti-establishment firebrand Samuel came to admire. In fact, she and her art have become agents of Duma’s shadowy and repressive government.
In Solomon’s provocative portrayal, Miriana’s about-face is not a corruption or abdication of her artistic temperament, but rather its fullest expression. As an academic, she initially earns Samuel’s admiration by forcefully advocating her own ideas — and chastising students for art that wasn’t sufficiently bold or political. But her fealty to her work, and belief in her own genius, prime her for radicalization by authoritarian forces who provide her with a platform and a challenge: brainwashing ordinary people like Samuel through the power of her art.
Solomon, 34, has spoken of his interest in architecture and planned communities, from Birobidzhan (a territory designated by the Soviet Union as a “homeland” for Jews) to Celebration, Disney’s spooky-cute company town outside its Florida theme park. A Brutal Design is most successful when that affection shines through Samuel’s narration: While red flags about Duma’s authoritarian underpinnings abound from the first pages of the novel, I couldn’t help but feel seduced, just as Samuel does, by the prospect of a better life there.
But the novel’s consideration of antisemitism suffers for its lack of grounding in space or time. A Brutal Design could plausibly be set anytime in the recent past or near future, although phrases like “long-distance telephone” lend it a midcentury air. Samuel’s home country shares some features with the Soviet Union, while its authoritarian government is a definitively fascist one; the forms of antisemitism he experiences range from muted (country club-style slurs from a former classmate who becomes Miriana’s protégé in Duma) to extreme (witness the parents burned in their synagogue). But just as memorials to Nazi war crimes carry a variety of meanings depending on who is erecting them, European antisemitism has manifested in vastly different ways during different eras and regimes. Presenting a pastiche of decontextualized antisemitisms, Solomon characterizes this form of hatred as pervasive and almost mythic — raising the question, perhaps inadvertently, of why we should even bother trying to stop it.
But Samuel doesn’t think that way; he can’t afford to. As he wises up to Miriana’s true nature, her vulnerability to extremism makes him question his own architectural dreams: Even his idealistic visions of creating truly equal living spaces for Duma’s inhabitants involve, to some extent, forcing people to adopt the path he considers best. Faced with the possibility of “creating a mode of existence that was inflexible in its idealized flexibility,” Samuel ultimately loses his zeal for socialist building design, and his susceptibility to hero figures: In a world beset by nefarious political forces, no artist can prevent their work from being co-opted.
But the answer, in Solomon’s eyes, isn’t to stop making art, or to destroy art which was made for bad purposes. The crowning jewel of Miriana’s installations in Duma is a underground maze that breaks its victims by forcing them, 1984-style, to harm those they care about most. But when Duma’s overlords decide to bomb the city and its inhabitants — including Miriana — into oblivion, Samuel turns to the maze as a bunker and savior, finally using his teacher’s art to his own advantage. If Duma’s downfall demonstrates the pitfalls of planned communities, then Samuel’s survival shows that art achieves its highest meaning when used in ways its creators didn’t intend.
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