The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner

"The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, it still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to some prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez."