When a book opens with characters discussing asking Siri how to assassinate Donald Trump, you think you know what you’re in for; a one-sided liberal diatribe.
Certainly, the man behind it, David Leavitt, is a self-confessed liberal, author of nine literary novels, a university lecturer living in the Democrat enclave of Gainesville, Florida. Despite this, he might have done the impossible and written an almost balanced book about the era.
Shelter in Place, which follows ice-queen socialite Eva, her wealth manager husband Bruce and their gang of artsy hangers-on in the aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, both acknowledges their legitimate distaste for the president and, at the same time, skewers them for how they respond to his election. The New York Times called it “Sorkin on steroids”; an apt description of a book that mostly involves the well-coiffed and insufferable engaging in lengthy intellectual debate.
Leavitt, 59, never intended to write about Trump. The initial draft of the story dates back to 2009, and was set after Reagan’s election; but when he revisited it in 2017 it took him in another direction.
“I tried to set it in 2000 after the Bush- Gore debacle,” he says. “But I realised the reason it didn’t work was that it wasn’t the truth, I was trying to get away from what I was really thinking about.”
Not that he wanted to pen a polemic. “The most interesting scenes to write were when Bruce is with his neighbour, who is a Trump supporter. I didn’t want to create a typical liberal right-wing villain, a cliché. I thought it was important that voice be in there.”
For Eva, Trump’s inauguration is so appalling that she flees to Venice, where she ends up planning to buy a palatial apartment (this is the world of the one percenters). The fallout from that is what draws the novel together, but it’s the idea of needing to escape that preoccupies its author.
Leavitt’s last book, The Two Hotel Francforts, was set in Lisbon in 1940, in the wake of the Nazi invasion of France, and followed couples seeking safe passage to America. Researching that novel, he became fascinated by the stories of Parisian Jews, both those who fled and those who stayed.
“I found myself thinking, with quite a bit of pain, what would I have done? With the life I have now, very entrenched, a job at a university, a house. For me to up and leave would be a very difficult decision, would I have the guts to make it?” he says. “If I has been myself, a Jewish gay man in Paris in 1940, would I have left if it meant abandoning my entire life to undertake this very risky journey?”
Almost the day after Trump was elected, he noticed “the curious reversal of the conversation” with some Americans talking about leaving the country, or saying they were carrying their passports with them everywhere “in case”.
“I began to wonder about how much of that was paranoia and how much of that was just planning against a real disaster,” he says. That rumination ultimately became Shelter in Place, a story about “a group of people and a community trying to come to terms with something they feel unequal to”.
Of course, Eva is a caricature; ensconced in her fancy New York apartment; surely she doesn’t need to worry about Trump? Leavitt admits she does not come across as an obvious victim, but felt “the only way to write about this situation and make it not like slamming the reader against a brick wall was to make it a bit satirical. I felt one way to do that was to focus on this group of very privileged liberals.”
But it’s not all satire; Leavitt deliberately wrote Eva as the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland, and he wanted to ask questions about what safety really means. “I wanted to create someone who is very difficult, arrogant and privileged - but also the only person who is brave enough to be have a certain prescience.”
As he points out, the concerns Eva voices have not exactly been assuaged. It’s easy to forget the myriad impossible dramas of the last four years, from Trump’s impeachment to the sex scandals, and meanwhile, Leavitt notes, antisemitism is on the rise. Eva, says Leavitt, may be “the one person in her world who actually sees the truth”.
When we speak, three weeks before the election, Leavitt is cautiously confident of a Biden victory. But America exists “in a 24-second news cycle”, and it’s only getting faster. “God knows what might happen in the next three weeks. I’m almost afraid of jinxing things by making a prediction.”
Like Eva, Leavitt is wondering what to do if the result goes the other way, and has started researching places he could go if Trump wins again. “To me it is a real question. I don’t honestly think I can continue living in this country under those circumstances,” he says. “It’s really about being a member of any group that could be threatened by the extreme right and that includes Jews and blacks and gay people and trans people.”
Leavitt, whose ancestors came from a shtetl in Kaunas, grew up in California. His grandfather arrived here in the 1890s, changing the family’s name to Leavitt (interestingly, although it has a Jewish ring, he notes the name was a Puritan one; there is a record of one Silence Leavitt).
His father taught at Stanford; Judaism was peripheral at best. “My parents having themselves felt oppressed by their own upbringings tried to raise their children in a pretty secular environment,” he says. “We really weren’t given a whole lot of context for our Judaism. It really was only later in my life that I began to think of myself as Jewish.”
Now, thanks to the investigations of his anthropologist brother and a cousin, he knows more. “I often wonder what would I find if I went back to the tiny village that my grandfather came from – I hope I can do that someday. First I’ll have to be able to travel again.”
It might well be fodder for his next book – perhaps easier to write about than the present. Leavitt’s previous three were historical novels, giving him the advantage of knowing “how the story ended” - something no writer has the luxury of today.
With Florida experiencing a second wave, Leavitt admits he’s fortunate; a roomy house with space for both he and his husband to work, quiet places to walk nearby. Nevertheless, he’s gearing up for a fight with the University of Florida, which wants half of classes taught in person next term. He says the university heads have been making veiled threats of layoffs and furloughs for those that don’t cooperate. “I am ready to fight. If it comes to going on strike in order to keep teaching safe, I’ll do it.”
Leavitt has reason to be energised; he’s on the mend himself from an emergency appendicostomy. He learned a lot from midnight chats with nurses. “It made it a reality for me in a way that it hadn’t previously been, because suddenly I was in a situation where Covid was everywhere.”
If his book takes a nuanced approach to the Trump presidency and its fallout, Leavitt, then, is less concerned with doing so.
Instead, he’ll be spending election night “watching Fawlty Towers probably, to keep me distracted” - and hoping beyond hope that Shelter in Place will soon belong in the category of historical fiction.
Shelter in Place, Bloomsbury, 12th November
