Bezos’s behemoth, Amazon, has a significant part to play in the story, as do the stunning landscapes of the American West. The film has been called a gorgeous elegy for life after the American Dream: it asks what is it that we really need to make a life that contains joy and meaning, and also what it means to be human in a country where one man, Jeff Bezos, holds more wealth than 39 percent of all Americans put together. What Solnit recognized was that the revelatory story Bruder had told, of the people she had met while living for months at a time in a van and traveling with them, was a story very much of the moment, a tale of a tipping point, where more and more Americans, especially the elderly and the working class who are no longer able to afford traditional housing, have taken to the road, living in their vehicles. At the time, Rebecca Solnit said of Nomadland, “People who thought the 2008 financial collapse was over a long time ago need to meet the people Jessica Bruder got to know in this scorching, beautifully written, vivid, disturbing (and occasionally wryly funny) book.” Not that Bruder’s book didn’t get a lot of attention when it first came out: it ended up on half a dozen of the best book lists of 2017. THREE YEARS AGO, when Jessica Bruder, the author of the Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, published her nonfiction account of the growing tribe of nomads roaming the American West, people who live in their vans or cars or RVs and work seasonal jobs to get by, she couldn’t have known that her book would end up as a movie, directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Frances McDormand, one that is not only sweeping up awards but has also been embraced by a great cross-section of viewers who are enthralled by its generous and moving portrait of humanity.
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