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| 2 A.M. IN LITTLE AMERICA By Ken Kalfus | 《小美国凌晨2点》，肯·卡尔弗斯 著 |
| More than one observer of the social and political life of the United States has noted that our country feels as if it’s drifting toward civil war. We’re already divided into competing tribes of activists, officials and media personalities. From time to time, in places as diverse as Portland, Ore.; Kenosha, Wis.; and Charlottesville, Va., these divisions have produced actual street battles, with bloodshed and lost lives. | 不止一名美国社会和政治生活的观察者已注意到，我们的国家似乎给人一种正在走向内战的感觉。我们已经分裂为由活动人士、官员和媒体名人组成的相互抵触的部落。这些分裂不时地在俄勒冈州的波特兰、威斯康星州的克诺沙，以及弗吉尼亚州的夏洛茨维尔等存在极大差异的地方，引发真实的街头战斗，导致流血和死亡。 |
| In Ken Kalfus’s deeply intriguing new novel, “2 A.M. in Little America,” the next American civil war has already taken place. The people of the United States have become the world’s newest and biggest cohort of refugees, following Syrians and Salvadorans and many others into the cross-border and transoceanic routes of mass migration and diaspora. As the novel opens, the Americans living in exile in an unnamed country form an underclass of low-wage labor, exploited and vilified by the locals. The refugees carry the stigma of their Americanness, and studiously avoid one another’s company. “We were humiliated by what had happened; we would have reminded each other only of our grief and our shame,” Kalfus writes. The uprooted Americans can see that the locals have the deepest contempt for “how far our country had fallen.” | 在肯·卡尔弗斯高度引人入胜的新小说《小美国凌晨2点》(2 A.M. in Little America)一书中，美国的第二次内战已经发生。美国人成为世界上最新和最大的一批难民，步叙利亚、萨尔瓦多，以及许多其他国家国民的后尘，加入到跨国界、跨大洋的大移民、大流散中来。小说开篇，生活在一个无名国的流亡美国人在当地属于低薪劳工下层阶级，受当地人的剥削和蔑视。这些难民带着他们来自美国的恶名，刻意避免互相交往。“我们对所发生的事情感到羞辱；交往只会互相提醒我们的悲伤和耻辱，”卡尔弗斯写道。背井离乡的美国人能看出，当地人对“我们的国家已堕落到如此地步”有最深的鄙视。 |
| Kalfus is the author of a half-dozen novels and story collections, and his fiction often makes use of the events of the day (9/11, Chernobyl, the Iraq war) to create mordant satires and allegories about modern life. In “2 A.M. in Little America” he turns the conceit of his novel into a tense and often beautiful work of reflection on the American present. His protagonist, Ron Patterson, is an apolitical man exiled, as a young adult, from a city somewhere in the American heartland, the notorious site of some of the ugliest incidents of the civil war. Patterson is a loner, and as with so many immigrants and refugees in the real United States, his legal status is precarious in his adopted country. He’s forced to watch and listen as anti-immigrant activists express their grievances. “A MILLION UNEMPLOYED IS A MILLION IMMIGRANTS TOO MANY,” reads an airplane banner ad. The tables have turned on the American people, and Kalfus milks the irony in some ways that are predictable, and in others that are truly surprising. | 卡尔弗斯出版了多本小说和故事集，他的小说经常利用当下事件（9·11、切尔诺贝利、伊拉克战争），对现时生活进行尖刻的讽刺和寓言式创作。在《小美国凌晨2点》中，他把这部作品的别出心裁，变成了对美国当下令人紧张但往往美妙的反思。小说主人公罗恩·帕特森是个对政治不感兴趣的人，二十岁左右时不得不离开美国心脏地带的某市，那里因发生了内战中一些最令人不快的事件而臭名昭著。帕特森是个不合群的人，与生活在现实美国的许多移民和难民一样，他在移居国的法律身份不确定。他不得已地听着、看着反移民活动人士表达他们的不满。一条挂在飞机上的广告称：“一百万人失业是因为有一百万多出来的移民！”在对美国人进行转强为弱的处理时，卡尔弗斯对于这个奇特手法的充分利用之道，有些可以预见，有些则着实令人惊讶。 |
| At first, Patterson’s exile is a deeply existential one, focused on an obsession with a woman he thinks he sees everywhere in his adopted city. Then he’s forced to flee to yet another country, where he settles in an “enclave” of Americans. In this Little America, he’s thrust into a political drama. Competing militias of American exiles are intent on continuing their internecine warfare on foreign ground, and we learn about the atrocities both sides committed back home. Anyone familiar with the violence inflicted by the United States and its proxies in various imperial adventures around the globe will recognize the inspiration for Kalfus’s imagined back story — most notably, the crimes at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Once again, the chickens have come home to roost. | 起初，帕特森的流亡生活具有深刻的存在主义性质，这集中体现在他对一名女子的迷恋上。他认为在自己所移居的城市里，到处都能看到她。后来，他被迫逃到另一个国家，在那里的一个美国人“飞地”住了下来。在这个“小美国”，他卷入了一场戏剧性的政治事件。互不相容的美国流亡者民兵组织意图在外国领土上继续他们的内战，这让我们得以了解到各方在国内犯下的暴行。所有对美国及其代理人在世界各地的各种帝国冒险中所施加的暴力有所了解的人，都能看出卡尔弗斯想象的背景故事的灵感来源，最明显的是在伊拉克的阿布格莱布监狱犯下的罪行。恶果再一次报应到自己身上。 |
| What’s more interesting in “Little America” is an idea Kalfus repeats often: that the displaced Americans have a “look” and way of being that sets them apart from the locals. Nostalgic for the consumerism of home, they build crude replicas of big-box retailers, complete with their familiar color schemes. They share a passion for walking dogs. “People wore their clothes in the American style,” Kalfus writes, “and their faces were recognizably American.” But if the country they came from was a global melting pot, what does an “American” face look like? One wishes Kalfus had explored this idea further. Race and class conflicts are at the heart of the real-life disorder Americans are living, but Kalfus elides those differences in this work. Still, “2 A.M. in Little America” is a highly readable, taut novel. It pulls the reader into its world, and suggests that many interesting human complications await us at the end of the story called the United States of America. | 《小美国》里一个更有意思的构思，是卡尔弗斯经常重复的一个说法：背井离乡的美国人有一种使他们与当地人截然不同的“外表”和生存方式。由于怀念老家的消费主义，他们建起大卖场的简陋复制品，配上他们熟悉的装修色彩。他们都有遛狗的嗜好。“他们穿着美式风格的衣服，”卡尔弗斯写道，“一脸美国人的样子。”但如果他们的原住国曾是一个全球大熔炉的话，那么何为“美国人”的样子？很遗憾，卡尔弗斯没有进一步探讨这个概念。种族和阶级冲突是美国人在现实生活中混乱的核心所在，但卡尔弗斯在这部作品中略去了这些问题。尽管如此，《小美国凌晨2点》仍是一部可读性很强、情节紧凑的小说。它将读者拉进了其虚构的世界，并暗示在这个叫做美利坚合众国的故事结尾处，有许多耐人寻味的人类复杂性在等着我们。 |
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