More books to read if you like THE AMERICANS

Over at Parchment Girl, blogger Kate Scott recently posted a list of ten books to read if you like The Americans. When this was linked on Twitter, my immediate reaction was to remark that they were all books about the Cold War and/or spying, which isn’t actually at all the sort of book I’d recommend to fans of The Americans. Which yes, is flippant, but it’s also true — I’ve long believed that anybody who tries to watch The Americans primarily as a spy story is just going to be disappointed that it’s not something different, and in the process, will just end up missing out on the best bits of the show. Because of this, the books I’d recommend to fans of The Americans would instead be about identity. About the dark side of empathy. About the psychological cost of lying.

So with that in mind, here’s my own list of books I would recommend to fans of The Americans. I couldn’t make it quite to ten, but I did come up with four novels, a non-fiction book, and a stage play, for a total of six.

The novels:

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Four-sentence summary: Miles Cheshire is a young man obsessed with searching for his mentally ill but brilliant twin brother, Hayden, who has spent years covering his tracks. Recent high-school graduate Lucy Lattimore has just sneaked away from small-town Ohio with her charismatic former history teacher, and she’s even more excited about the prospect of an entirely new life than she is about him. Ryan Schuyler is a university student who is believed to be dead after getting wrapped up in criminal activity, and he takes advantage of this situation to step out of his own life. In this story of identity theft that tips over into being a story about identity more generally, these three people’s lives come together with unexpected consequences.

Why fans of The Americans might like it: Everybody in this book is dealing with issues of identity in some way. Some change their identity (willingly or unwillingly), while others are struggling with how to define themselves in a way that is not just through someone else. The underlying theme here, though, is that identity is fluid — so fluid, in fact, that nobody has only one single core self. Most importantly, though, it’s a book that forces you to think about all the ways that stepping away from your life and becoming someone else isn’t just about adventure and freedom, but also about danger and loneliness and heartbreak.

The Likeness by Tana French

Three-sentence summary: Cassie Maddox is a young Dublin police detective investigating the murder of a woman who not only looks exactly like her, but has been living under an alias Cassie used in an earlier undercover assignment. Because of her undercover experience, Cassie is assigned to impersonate the dead woman both to investigate her death and discover who she really was. In the process, she forms deep bonds with the dead woman’s former housemates — who are suspects in the murder — blurring the boundaries between her real and fictional identities.

Why fans of The Americans might like it: If you can get past the unlikely central conceit of the doppelgänger, this story has every ingredient that makes The Americans so special, cooked up into an entirely different sort of dish. At its core, this is a book about people assuming false identities and then ending up sort of becoming those false identities, thereby messing with the lines between the real and the fictional in dangerous, unethical, and mutually mindfucky ways. The psychologies of the characters are also the key to absolutely everything that happens: the “relationship” between the central protagonist and the woman whose death she’s investigating is particularly heady stuff, but the secondary characters also each have their own complex psychologically-driven motivations. Finally, like The Americans, this book gets bonus points for taking particular care with subtle issues of language and dialect. (P.S. Don’t worry about it being part of a series; each book in this series has a different protagonist and is only tangentially related to the others.)

11/22/63, by Stephen King

Three-sentence summary: Jake Epping, a high school remedial English teacher in small-town Maine, is enlisted by the owner of the local diner to take over his mission of going back in time and preventing the Kennedy assassination. He ends up in small-town Texas decades before he was born, where he begins a new life and prepares (over the course of several years) to thwart Lee Harvey Oswald’s fateful actions. In the process, he has to not only think about what it means to rewrite world history, but also what it means to change the course of his own.

Why fans of The Americans might like it: You’re probably thinking “I’ve heard of this one! Wait…isn’t that a time-travel story or something?” But it’s also a story about a man who arrives in a new place with a difficult but straightforward mission, only to find himself falling in love both with aspects of his new life and with a woman who he can’t divulge his true identity to, at which point things no longer feel quite so straightforward. And of course, this very duality makes it a book that’s a simple genre tale on the surface but deep down it’s secretly about something else, which is The Americans all over.

Seven Lies by James Lasdun

Three-sentence summary: Stefan Vogel is a young East German who longs for love, glory, and freedom on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and in particular in America. Leaving his past behind him much as the world leaves the Berlin Wall behind, he weaves a web of lies that helps make this fantasy come true. And this works beautifully for him until those lies start to unravel.

Why fans of The Americans might like it: This isn’t as good a book as the other three novels I’ve listed (the characters aren’t nearly as interesting), but it’s certainly the closest of them to a conventional Cold War spy novel. Like The Americans, though, it’s still a bit different from what you’d initially expect from a “political thriller.” It’s about morality, it’s about the human cogs who are the secret to the success of all repressive regimes, and most of all, it’s about what happens when a lifetime of lies catches up to you (both professionally and personally).

The non-fiction book:

True Story: Memoir, Mea Culpa, by Michael Finkel

Three-sentence summary: Michael Finkel is a disgraced former journalist who has just been fired from his job at the New York Times for falsifying a story that gained him a lot of attention. His life gets even stranger, though, when he finds out that a young man named Christian Longo —who is wanted by the FBI for murdering his entire family — has recently been captured in Mexico, where he has been living under the identity of…Michael Finkel, New York Times reporter. Soon after this confluence of events, the two of them begin to talk to each other, and this book is the story of the strange, compelling relationship between these two problematic men.

Why fans of The Americans might like it: This is a book that dives deep into the psychology of lying and manipulation, really trying not just to explain it, but to empathize with it. Yet it does this without ever trying to excuse it. It’s a fine line that Finkel walks, here — the same line, I’d argue, that the creators of The Americans walk — but he does so brilliantly. Also like The Americans, this is a story in which a number of shocking and almost unbelievable things happen that actually can be demonstrated to have happened in real life.

The stage play:

The Story, by Tracey Scott Wilson

Three-sentence summary: Yvonne Wilson is an ambitious black newspaper reporter who goes against her editor to investigate the murder of a young white man shot to death by a black assailant in the “bad part of the city.” In researching the story, though, she gets caught up in telling the “best” version of it and is accused of playing fast and loose with the facts. The result is a story about race, about class, about the gap between older and younger generations, but most of all about the thin line between a truth and a lie.

Why fans of The Americans might like it: Stories about the complex nature of truth and lying are The Americans’ bread and butter, of course. But in a truly delightful twist, it turns out that Tracey Scott Wilson is now an actual writer for the show (which made me cheer out loud the first time I saw her byline on an episode, because of course this is a show that hired the author of The Story for their writers’ room)!

Happy reading!