Book Review: The Postmortal by Drew Magary

There needs to be a new term for novels with a science fiction-y premise that are nonetheless written in a literary fashion. You probably know the type I'm talking about -- novels like Cloud Atlas , various Atwood novels, lots of Vonnegut, etc. Into this group I would lump The Postmortal , by Drew Magary. The novel contains a fascinating premise and is an enjoyable read, but is probably too existential for exclusive fans of genre fiction and way too fanciful for fans of strict realistic fiction, making it a bit awkward for it to find a comfortable niche, kind of like me at a party.

Here's the premise: in the great tradition of Fleming, a geneticist accidentally discovers a cure for aging. People can still die of accidents, starvation, cancer, etc. -- but they will never grow old, and in theory they could live for hundreds of years.

As thought experiments go, it's a great one, in that it challenges one's assumptions: to what extent are we motivated by mortality? To what extent is longevity desirable on an individual level? On a societal level?

In his end-of-the-novel acknowledgements, Magary thanks someone for helping him to "make this book into a real novel, instead of a masturbatory idea dump." This is a fairly good summary of the book and the shortcomings it mostly avoids: the novel presents a very detailed and reasonable view of the future (giving us snapshots across almost eighty years of time), while still grounding the narrative in the experiences and perspective of one central character. (One clever device Magary uses is to exploit the conceit that the novel is supposed to be a compilation of blog posts by occasionally giving us "link round-ups," which show international developments and hint at events outside the scope of the main character.)

You may have noticed that I keep referring to the main character without a name -- I honestly don't remember his name. This is partly because the story is told in the first person, so it doesn't come up that often, but also partly because -- going alone with the above-mentioned issue of occasionally struggling to be a story in addition to a thought experiment -- the main character is a bit of an everyman, and while his "voice" is eminently readable and moves along at a nice clip (an accomplishment I'm not deriding), it is also not exactly unique or arresting. In the end, the novel may still fall more toward being about ideas than characters, but the main character's arc has still left me contemplating him and his decisions, which is a good sign.

This novel has very humorous parts, but one would also (spoiler alert) not be remiss to apply the term "dystopian" to it. Overall: recommended, but not for any of you struggling to find a reason to believe in humanity again.

(And for those of you wondering how this fits into the theme of the blog, I say that reading off-the-map fiction and then reviewing it for nobody but themselves is really the quintessential activity of/for aimless millennials.)