In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Jeff Sharlet about his new collection of essays, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (2023, W.W. Norton).

The Undertow is an incisive and at times foreboding collection. It is made up of ten interrelated essays that map the social, cultural and religious geographies of the contemporary United States. The collection takes the killing of Ashli Babbitt as its through line. Babbit was the pro-Trump insurrectionist shot and killed by a capital police officer on January 6 2021 who has since been turned into a far-right martyr.

Across these essays, Sharlet tracks the volatile combination of Christian evangelicalism and far-right paranoia that is fueled by conspiracy-laden social media platforms. On top of these trends Sharlet also discusses the eschatological belief in regeneration and redemption through violence. Traveling across the United States–from Sacramento, to Nevada, from Nebraska to Wisconsin, from Trump rallies to fundamentalist, warrior-Jesus megachurches and big tent revivals, to the front porches and kitchens of Confederate and Gadsden flag waving folks–Sharlet’s essays have a fever-dream-momentum.

A masterful blending of journalistic reporting, essay, and memoir, The Undertow is a book “written from the middle of something, a season of coming apart.” It is a “book of stories of difficult people doing terrible things” that registers “grief and its distortions, how loss sometimes curdles into fury and hate, or denial, or delusion.” Whiteness is the implicit and explicit specter that haunts the essays’ proceedings, and Sharlet offers provocative and productive ways of reimagining the roots and routes of White supremacy in the 21st century United States.

The opening and closing essays in the collection highlight two radical singers and performers–Harry Belafonte and folk singer Lee Hays–offering modicums of hope against the rising tide of fascism in the mid-twentieth century.

Follow Jeff on Twitter @JeffSharlet.

Image of author courtesy of W.W. Norton