Class

Perhaps the most central underlying motif of The Displacements is the class anxiety that marks the Larsen-Halls' journey through the annals of the FEMA shelter system. The early stages of the novel take aim at questions of ethics as pertain to access and privilege, directly implicating Daphne and Brantley in the idea that the upper class routinely participates in wasteful behavior. The post-Luna sections of the novel, meanwhile, explore the ways in which class can become a fungible, shifting category, and use the obliviousness of the Larsen-Halls as a means of revealing the suffering experienced by money-poor communities.

The early stages of the novel are set in the suburbs of Miami, and they allow Holsinger an opportunity to chronicle various examples of gratuitous consumption and waste in the lifestyles of the people who live there. The depictions of Miami and Coral Gables in Part One of...