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A Flawed Novel Addresses A Failed Utopia: On Gabriel Bump’s The New Naturals
We can never escape the world. Nor can we remake it. This truism underscores all great would-be utopian novels, from Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon — an anagram of “nowhere” — to dystopias proper like Brave New World and 1984, to failed-cult novels like Emma Cline’s The Girls. Any attempt to lift a few, quixotic human beings out of the psychosocial morass of human nature