The Undertow

Scenes from a Slow Civil War

21 April 2023

Description

One of America’s finest reporters and essayists explores the powerful currents beneath the roiled waters of a nation coming apart

Nominally Christian churches glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while others celebrate an ecstatic indulgence in hate, citing Scripture whilst preparing for civil war. Lonely men gather to rage against women. There, too, in the undertow, the forty-fifth president of the United States, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood, and the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on 6 January at the US Capitol, is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood.

Both political inquiry and meditation, as poetic as it is profound and disturbing, The Undertow captures a decade of growing division in the US: roughly 2011–2021. Jeff Sharlet examines currents of gender, faith and money that brought us to the “Trumpocene,” and finally, explores a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism. Beginning and closing with freedom songs of the past whose critique of American failures are nonetheless a vision of American possibility, The Undertow is a necessary reckoning with the present, precarious condition.

Reviews

"A riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America." — Joseph O'Neill, The New York Times Book Review

"[Sharlet’s] stories are as necessary as they are harrowing. The writing is explicit and expansive, almost cinematic, like looking at a battlefield from above. Altogether, it’s a rare achievement, a cultural-political book that is literary.... [The Undertow] has a narrative arc that captures the fever pitch of the past decade." — Ann Neumann, The Guardian

"[The Undertow] is journalism-as-art, attempting to capture the mood of the nation at this fraught moment, that others in the future may know how it felt to live through the present. Hopefully there will still be readers then." — Adam Fleming Petty, The Washington Post

"[The Undertow] is a foreboding drive through the backroads of the country’s rising militancy. From campy Trump rallies and a memorial service for the January 6 insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt to a televangelist’s church in Miami and a self-declared prophet in Omaha, Sharlet takes a hard, unwavering look at the nation’s guns-and-Bibles underbelly" — James Sullivan, The Boston Globe

"Sharlet's startling, Didion-esque The Undertow, with its CinemaScope landscapes and slightest of hopes, visits the dirt lanes and country rallies where Christian nationalism threatens. " — Chicago Tribune

Awards

Shortlisted — National Book Critics Circle Award, 2023

Also By: Jeff Sharlet

This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers
Jeff Sharlet
Paperback, 2024
“A luminous, moving and visual record of fleeting moments of connection.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

A visionary work of radical empathy.
This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers
Jeff Sharlet
Hardback, 2020
A visionary work of radical empathy.
This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers
Jeff Sharlet
E Book, 2020
“A luminous, moving and visual record of fleeting moments of connection.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

A visionary work of radical empathy.
Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between
Jeff Sharlet
E Book, 2012
“A master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.”—Michael Washburn, Washington Post
Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between
Jeff Sharlet
Paperback, 2012
“A master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.”—Michael Washburn, Washington Post