Death and drugs and Derrida, oh my

[bloodygranuaile]

The next book for BSpec's book club is Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y, which Lyndsay chose upon her appointment to the rotating dictatorship of book club. I'm pretty sure Lyndsay has also given me another Scarlett Thomas book out of the HMH stash, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, because ::gestures to TBR shelves::.

The title of this book is also the title of the book that this book is about, in the tradition of many other books about books. In this one, The End of Mr. Y is a little-known 19th-century work of fiction of which there is only one known copy in the world, and which is supposedly cursed, because everyone who has ever read it has died.

Our protagonist is Ariel Manto, an English Lit Ph.D. student doing a thesis on thought experiments. She's interested in the little-known 19th century philosopher who wrote The End of Mr. Y, as is her Ph.D. supervisor, who mysteriously disappears. Some time after he disappears, Ariel finds a copy of the book in a secondhand bookshop, and finds the recipe for a tincture that can take the drinker into a sort of mind-jumping Matrix-like telepathy-land that the author of The End of Mr. Y called the Troposphere.

At first I found Ariel a very relatable protagonist in that she is an overthinking, anxiety-brained, potato-baking, financially strapped book nerd with a general interest in weird nineteenth-century stuff but a sustained tendency toward serially obsessive topic-hopping, researching her way around different subjects every month. Before she does her Ph.D. she writes a magazine article called Free Association, published monthly, which sounds like a fantasy writing assignment -- she basically takes an entire month to write each article, and just writes about whatever topic she's interested in that month. (The fact that she can subsist off of one piece of writing each month pretty much blew my suspension of disbelief to hell, even if this book was published pre- the world economy imploding and takes place outside the U.S. But it was a nice fantasy.) She gets laid more than me, but not only do all novel protagonists, I'm pretty sure most real people do as well. But as the book went on, and Ariel drifted more and more into being a sort of stock Troubled Antihero, I grew more and more annoyed with the sort of flatly gritty quality of the book's depictions of the "real" world. Ariel started to remind me of The Toast's piece "A Day in the Life of a Troubled Male Antihero," except that she was female, which ought to be a bigger subversion than this felt like -- it was still all cigarettes and colorless sex, both of which are tropes that I feel are basically cheap ways of establishing a book as A Book for Adults. Characters who have a lot of sex but are too deep or damaged or whatever to enjoy any of it are one of my pet peeves, as is deliberately writing sex scenes with no emotion to them whatsoever just to establish that the character/the author/the audience/someone somewhere, I don't know, is definitely world-weary and blase enough to know that sex happens but it's nothing to get excited about. A one-paragraph sex scene randomly inserted into another scene that you could cut out without interrupting the flow of the conversation at all is one that probably should be cut. Also, if you're going to throw a lot of pointless sex into a book just for the sake of -mundanity and realism- and stuff, I'm going to notice things like that nobody ever uses condoms and the main character doesn't seem to be on birth control of any sort, yet nobody has even a single passing thought about the possibility of pregnancy or STDs.

From that point, other stuff started to annoy me more: The MC is apparently quite poor, and much attention is paid to having little money (which I relate to), but she doesn't seem to have any of the strings that being poor usually comes with: She doesn't have a credit card, she doesn't seem to have any debt, when she abandons her apartment she doesn't seem to be worried about any kind of liability for not making the next month's rent -- she's basically poor but free in a way that being poor doesn't really allow people to be free. It gives the whole thing a sort of ungrounded quality that renders all the other kinds of details that seem to be trying to establish groundedness (i.e., the constant monitoring of how much cash she has on hand -- a set of mental calculations that I am, in fact, quite familiar with) feel like a sort of poverty-chic set dressing rather than having much urgency to them. And I'm not even going to get into how the whole Aimless Academic trope that's so popular is just wildly contrary to anything I hear coming out of academia these days. Maybe it's a British vs. US thing, maybe it's an old economy vs. new economy thing, but if Ariel Manto were at a US university in 2016 trying to do what she's doing, she'd be an adjunct professor with multiple courses to teach and $90K in student loan debt, and she'd have fought out fifty competitors tooth and nail for the position, rather than being randomly invited to do a Ph.D. at a conference and just showing up and doing it.

The other thing that messed with my suspension of disbelief is that the mystical tincture that brings people to the magical realm of the troposphere is a homeopathic remedy, which means it's almost entirely water.

There are more advanced scientific concepts tackled in the book, including lots of physics ones that I am minimally familiar with, so I cannot nitpick them. But the characters specifically talk about learning a lot of these concepts from popular science books, and in the areas of science in which I am more than minimally well-versed, the gaps between real science and popular science are a major source of interest to me. An especially interesting article I read yesterday actually did talk about this problem as it relates to theoretical physics. The result: I'm enormously, if uninformedly, skeptical of about 99% of the discussions about science in this book, and this book is in very large part discussions of science and philosophy and the nature of reality and all that. The philosophy I could also probably stand to be better versed in. But ultimately, while using simplifications, metaphors, and models can help you understand scientific concepts at a rudimentary level, having an understanding of the simple versions of scientific concepts doesn't help you solve actual problems in those fields. Ariel Manto is about as well equipped to come up with major breakthroughs in anything physics-related as I am to personally design and program a functioning digital currency system (I just did a month's research and wrote an article on bitcoin). This book definitely belongs to a subcategory of "trashy-intellectual" that I actually tend to like quite a lot -- the Outlander books have a similar "my research, let me show u it" vibe, as does the Discovery of Witches series. I am enormously susceptible to this particular brand of guilty pleasure. I found myself wanting to challenge this one a lot more than I usually do, probably because the research concepts it's splashing around in are fundamental questions about the nature of reality so it seems to be taking itself really seriously, even though it's basically just a big nerd-neurosis fantasy along the lines of Dune but for different types of nerd-neurosis. The story eventually seems to conclude that you can rewrite the universe by thinking about it sophisticatedly enough, which I think is clearly a "What am I doing with my life, what is the point of doing all this obscure research nobody cares about" academic-existential-crisis-assuaging sort of fantasy.

Which, quite frankly, I do think is a really interesting set of fears to write a wish-fulfillment story for.

And frankly, the Troposphere was fun. The general mystery with the book and the being chased by ex-CIA agents and jumping around in people's minds and through history and into being mice and cats and other people was a good dramatic fantasy romp. The excerpts of fake 19th-century writing with its ploddingly moralistic tone and creepy, tawdry circuses were delightful. Many of the secondary characters are flat-out hilarious, although I'm not sure they're intended to be. The whole thing would make a trippy as hell animated miniseries or something; or even a live-action one with maybe an exaggerated Tim Burton-y aesthetic. I would totally watch that.

I'll be interested to see what aspects of the book people seize on to talk about at book club. Since this is BSpec book club and not the sci-fi group book club, I think I can at least count on the discussion not being just three hours of How Does Time Travel Work, at least.