Bad Americans: Part II by Tejas Desai is a sprawling novel-in-stories set during the summer of 2020, after New York’s Covid lockdown, when billionaire dating-app magnate Olive Mixer gathers twelve Americans at his Hamptons estate for an experiment in romance, confession, competition, and moral exposure. Each night, a guest tells a story; in this second half, the book moves through Lisa’s #MeToo-inflected art-world account, Khassan’s provocation, Hayley’s modeling-world tale, Pritesh’s immigrant-professional odyssey, Sylvania’s fashion-and-identity chronicle, and Angela’s bruising finale, all while the frame narrative tightens around accusation, loyalty, illness, desire, and the question of who gets believed.

I admired the book most when it refused to let any character become a clean emblem. Desai is writing about America as a loud room where everyone has a grievance, a wound, a blind spot, and a microphone. The result can be abrasive, but productively so. The frame narrative has the nervous electricity of a reality show filmed inside a moral philosophy seminar: people flirt, sulk, posture, accuse, console, and revise themselves in public. I found that messy social weather more compelling than any single plot turn. The book understands that “discourse” isn’t abstract; it happens over food, sex, money, race, fear, vanity, and the old human need to be the injured party.

The novel’s appetite is almost gargantuan: it wants to absorb pandemic politics, gender conflict, race, class, immigration, celebrity, sexual harm, art, fashion, social media, tech money, and literary history all at once. Still, I would rather read a book that risks excess than one polished into anesthesia. Desai’s best scenes have a jagged vitality; they make the reader sit in contradiction instead of offering the soft chair of easy judgment.

I would recommend this to readers of literary fiction, social satire, contemporary American fiction, and frame narrative experiments, especially book clubs willing to argue rather than merely agree. Readers who enjoy the social sweep of Tom Wolfe or the polyphonic setup of The Decameron will recognize the pleasure of watching a whole culture refracted through competing stories, though Desai’s sensibility is rawer, more contemporary, and more quarrelsome.

Pages: 454 | ASIN : B0GGV7Q3TH