‘American Dreamer’ looks at complexities of identity, allegiance

Readers might think they know Brent Cummings, the main character in David Finkel’s “An American Dreamer.” He’s “a white male pickup-driving ex-soldier living in a Georgia county where in 2016 Donald Trump received 71 percent of the votes.”

But people are complicated. And one of the strengths of this excellent book is how deftly Finkel presents those complications.

“Dreamer” follows Cummings between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. When Finkel began this book, “I had no way of knowing what would take place,” he notes. With immersion journalism — following a person over time — the writer doesn’t know how a story will play out, or even, sometimes, what the story is. But Finkel — a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with the Washington Post — believed that following people “wrestling with their own questions about what was happening would lead to a story worth adding to the record of such a pivotal time in American history.”

A pivotal time indeed. Like many others, Cummings and his wife, Laura, went to bed on Election Night 2016 assuming Hillary Clinton had won but woke up to find the world utterly changed.

Cummings was a key character in “The Good Soldiers,” Finkel’s harrowing book about the 2007 surge in Iraq. He has been home for 13 years, but trauma has followed. Most nights, he wakes up screaming from nightmares of “darkness. No, more than darkness. Blackness. … mocking laughter and blackness into infinity.”

He wrestles with institutional racism at the university where he runs the ROTC program. Later, he is deployed to Jerusalem to train security forces in the West Bank and, from abroad, reads Trump’s tweets with a sinking sense of disbelief.

Juxtaposed with Cummings’s story is that of his neighbor. Michael is an ardent Trump supporter — he knew that Hillary Clinton, “no matter what she might have promised, was going to take his guns away, every one of them, even the shotgun his father had given him when he was twelve. He despised her.”

Finkel portrays him fully and with empathy; Michael may be a gun-loving Trumper, but he never becomes a caricature.

This book is a fast read, but a simple style does not mean a simple book. It is deeply reported and weaves together multiple themes. Finkel witnessed most scenes himself and asked people what was going through their minds. The result is a narrative that both shows and tells.

Finkel tucks the past — scenes from Iraq and other memories — into those four Trump years. Cummings emerges as a full, complex character, a man who believes in his vows to his wife and country, who grew up believing “anything was possible … as long as you did the right thing.” The election of Donald Trump bewildered him. “Donald Trump, a man who did everything wrong …. was being rewarded with the presidency. And what, Brent wondered, was the lesson there?”

Michael takes a different view. Trump, he fervently believes, is “the only one out there trying to protect American values.”

In this intimate, remarkable book, Finkel lets us inside the worlds of two imperfect men. By doing so, he helps us understand the fragmented reality that is America today.

Laurie Hertzel is a writer in St. Paul. She is at lauriehertzel@gmail.com

An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country

By: David Finkel.

Publisher: Random House, 238 pages, $32.