It might seem that Bruder’s protagonists have fallen through the cracks of the system, but this would be the wrong way to think about it. In the absence of a robust social program, this is the system: they work for our parks; they take advantage of policing protocols that tacitly allow white elders to sleep in parking lots; they live partially on whatever Social Security income they have; and they work for huge government-subsidized companies such as Amazon that are at the forefront of our new economy. They are scraping together work in a “gig economy” that affords them precious few protections and resources, while calling upon all of their creativity and strength. They are at the bleeding edge of neoliberal consolidation, and the only difference between them and their children might be that they can remember a time when they were promised something different.

May especially is a force of nature, and she refuses to define herself as a woman in decline or as the victim of a fraying U.S. experiment. Like many of Bruder’s subjects, she prefers to see herself as a pioneer in the forging of a new American dream. While we should not romanticize her plight, we should not pity her either. She and her peers gather around quasi-utopian communities, online and in deserts, devoted to anti-consumerist values. They create shadow economies of books and techniques; they forge new friendships and they fall in love. They have, in other words, much to give—and one suspects we are all worse off because so much of that energy is spent living precariously and under exploitative working conditions. Nomadland is, in the end, a book about the creation of new kinds of life amidst the wreckage of economic exclusion. For May, economic depression can be an opportunity for reinvention, and for the recovery of forms of freedom and community undercut by an exhausted capitalism.