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This piece was originally published by Smile Politely.
Our world has no shortage of power-hungry dictators, sadly. What might the college town of Champaign-Urbana have looked like in 1991 under an authoritarian government? Author Sarah Lariviere, a Champaign, Illinois, native with deep roots in Central Illinois, offers a look at such a life in her rousing novel Riot Act, published in 2024 by Knopf/Random House.
In the book, a gregarious capitalist named Bud Hill attains huge personal success and starts a repressive political party called SYXSTEM, with connected government officials in and around C-U. The movement catches on nationwide, and the hardscrabble thespian teenagers in Riot Act must watch their every move, from the magazines they read to working the dinner shift at the now-defunct Round Barn Restaurant. But as teens will, these gals and guys test limits, breaking stern societal rules to better their world and have some fun where they can get it.
The threat of creating art in autocratic societies has long interested Lariviere, going back to her days studying abroad in Budapest, Hungary, in the mid-1990s. The idea for Riot Act came about in 2015 when she was working on her second novel, Time Travel for Love and Profit. Lariviere was no fan of authority as a teenager herself, and part of what led her to Budapest was a desire to witness firsthand how artists living under the so-called Iron Curtain rules of Eastern Europe dealt with censorship.
“Within that world, I wanted the characters to debate the value of violent versus non-violent resistance – another topic which I care deeply about,” said Lariviere, who lives in Burbank, California.
Riot Act contains the perfect blend of tenseness, humor, and poignancy. Though Champaign-Urbana in Lariviere’s world is bleak, readers with C-U ties will love some of the twin-city sites these characters visit, in what feels like simpler times despite the surrounding danger. The Rolling Acres subdivision, a budding internet, and a play that must get made by determined teenagers from Champaign High School are all a part of the action.
“Part of the reason I set the story in Champaign in 1991 is because I wanted to draw upon my own experiences, to keep the characters’ reactions to their circumstances as natural as possible,” Lariviere said.
Here’s more from the talented novelist, who graduated from Centennial High School in 1993 in a free and open society.
Smile Politely: You’ve read many books about repressive regimes worldwide. What are your thoughts on those who live under authoritarian rule?
Sarah Lariviere: As much as I try to imagine what it might be like to live with an autocratic government, I know I cannot. The book attempts it – but the psychology of someone who is relentlessly bullied, terrorized, strong-armed, attacked? The internal and external systems one would need to build and maintain to keep one’s humanity intact? It’s very difficult for an American like me to fathom.
However, people living in such circumstances often find heroic ways to keep loving relationships, communities, connections, and hope alive. Developing astonishing creativity, and resilience. Continuing to care for the earth, for animals – and to imagine different, more harmonious futures. But it’s not easy, and under debilitating or impoverished circumstances, it’s not always possible. It’s nearly unfathomable for some of us to grasp the sacrifices people make and the strengths they develop to stay sane when their rights are curtailed, when oppression is enforced with brutal violence.
I’m immensely grateful for my life and the privileges I’ve had as an American, and struggle to understand my role in continuing to ensure and expand human rights in this country, as well as the health and happiness of all beings. In my first career, as a social worker for children and families, I worked toward this end on a micro-level, thinking about families as places where one can be repressed, or grow freely. Creating better realities within families felt manageable to me, like I could really partner with people to make changes that allowed them to be happier and more fulfilled, by their own definitions.
SP: How did you get the idea to have a deceased narrator in Riot Act, and what were some of the challenges of making that point of view work?
Lariviere: When I finally sat down to write the book, the main character, Max, showed up instantly. Fully dead. He told me “Summer’s over and I’m still f*ing dead,” or words to that end, and I just went with it.
The biggest challenge might have been integrating Max’s story, which he’s telling from the beyond, with the story of Gigi, his living best friend, whose consciousness he inhabits. Max is comical, raunchy, a bit obnoxious, and lovable – he’s a real scene-stealer. Gigi is a quieter character in some ways – less attention-grabby. I probably cut 400 pages of Max’s pontification by the time I reached final drafts. He loves to talk, and I loved to write it all down!
Writing from the perspective of a dead character was comforting, actually. It forced me to investigate my relationship to death. Just before the book was published, one of my best friends died, leaving behind a child the same age as my son. This shattering experience has kept questions of life and death in the foreground for me, as a writer, and I suspect that death will continue to be a central topic in my work for some time.
SP: These characters are friends, and yet at times they keep important information from one another. Was that a technique you used as a microcosm of these teenagers living in a nontransparent society, or were they simply being teenagers?
Lariviere: A bit of both. In places where autocracy reigns, seeding distrust between members of resistance groups is a tried-and-true tactic to destroy those groups. So I needed to test the kids’ trust of one another, and of themselves, in various ways, and to make betrayal, on several levels, a critical aspect of the drama of the events that unfold.
I wanted to draw upon the natural tendency of teenagers in any circumstances to save face, to act smarter or cooler or more confident than we are, to hide our vulnerabilities and flaws. I wanted to show how our micro-betrayals of our true selves – wearing masks, being a bit false – can lead to big, damaging rifts in our relationship with reality, and with other people. I wanted to show messy, conflicted kids in a place some think of as the middle of nowhere making heroic choices, including choosing to love and forgive each other despite their secrets and flaws, and the police state’s attempts to manipulate them.
SP: What elements does Champaign bring to Riot Act, and why do you think the city was a good location for the story?
Lariviere: I loved so much about growing up in Champaign. It was an unpressured and unhurried place to live. In fact, I tried to include the thing I most appreciate about having grown up there, which was the sense of infinite possibility. We really were, especially back then, fairly isolated – no internet, limited television stations. For those of us unaffiliated with the university, especially, it was very rural.
But we had so much sky! And the flat expanses of fields all around… the place always felt to me like a big deep breath, or a big blank canvas. This was palpable to me even as a kid – whatever I struggled with, I took solace and inspiration from the space and time that surrounded me. Since then, I’ve lived in New York City; Boston; Seattle; Austin; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Paris, France –all of which are fantastic cities, but none of which give you the same eerie stillness as Champaign.
So in a way, I gave my characters Champaign as a soothing place to counteract the misery of the police state. I wanted them to feel the same sense of potential that I used to feel – so that they would be inspired to create something out of “nothing,” by producing an outlawed Shakespeare play. I hope that the Riot Act series does Champaign-Urbana justice as a setting for the wildly creative visions of a bunch of crazy teenagers who want to make the world a more humane place.
SP: Toward the end of the book, you write this about the Rolling Acres subdivision on the southwest edge of Champaign: “It’s so heart-achingly open in every direction that you can, yes, to borrow the expression, see forever – but not only literally. There’s simply no excuse not to see past your own delusions of grandeur to the horizon.” Can you say more about those beautiful lines?
Lariviere: There’s something about being born somewhere and leaving that place that keeps it in a magic snow globe, of sorts. You can shake it up in your memory, and make it snow again, enchanted for a while. I can’t help but associate the mystery of life with Champaign-Urbana, since it’s the first place I knew. I hope those lines point to that mystery, with reverence for our particular geography, the specific sensory experience of that flat, expansive landscape that’s emblazoned upon the souls of those of us who knew it as kids.
Book two in the Riot Act series will be released from Knopf/Random House in June of 2026. The author promises plenty of surprises and cameos from a few classic C-U locations that weren’t in the first book.
Photos provided by Sarah Lariviere.