Books I Read This Month: July 2023
Ashlee Vance • Emma Cline • John Troyer • Claire Keegan • Dino Buzzati
When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach (Ashlee Vance)
Ashlee Vance’s exceedingly well-written though willfully ingenuous 2023 book, When the Heavens Went on Sale, is mercifully not a breathless account of edgelord billionaires pushing to colonize Mars, an inhospitable planet where no human should be, or those deep-pocketed men-children wishing to transform the moon into a gaudy Gingrich-esque amusement park. The author instead turned out a dubious volume of another sort, focusing with wide eyes on the Twenty-First Century rise of the private space industry, the commercialization of the exosphere. He cherry-picks his way through Space Race 2.0, which has been sparked by the plunging costs of consumer electronics and computing power which permits small companies to compete with large governments, and the emergent new economy being formed in low Earth orbit. Vance writes excitedly about the future that the sector is currently enabling with a constellation of smaller, cheaper satellites being poured into space via smaller, cheaper rockets: “They will blanket the globe with an ever-present Internet heartbeat that will let drones, cars, planes, and all manner of computing devices and sensors send and receive data no matter where they are.” He adds that “the Internet will be inescapable,” meaning it as a blessing and not a curse.
Vance stacks the deck in favor of the positives this brave new world will empower. There are certainly some practical advantages, which he stresses to the point of exhaustion. Streams of satellites orbiting Earth can do remarkable reconnaissance: Amazon Rain Forest depletion can be monitored, weather patterns better understood, crop outputs improved, etc. Other practical but-far-less-interesting applications the author trumpets include commodities traders utilizing imaging from space to forecast corn yields, increasing their profits. (I mean, who gives a flying fuck?) The downsides, though, are massive and largely go unmentioned. Even beyond the increasing militarization of space that will be made possible by this “progress,” the author’s straight-from-central-casting dreamers and misfits are rapidly turning our planet into a global panopticon, a constantly humming surveillance state, our species being permanently lowered into a fascistic machine that can’t be unplugged. It’s a totalitarian nightmare, an invitation to social credit systems, but it’s impossible to know the thoughts about this Faustian bargain held by Vance or almost any of his subjects because the topic is conveniently barely broached. Any reporter who accepts bromides and bumper stickers for rationales, not probing any further, isn’t really doing his job. (“We go to space to improve life on Earth,” one rocket entrepreneur tells us, before (and after) going back on his pledge to never do work for the U.S. military.)
It’s frustrating because Vance is a real talent whose book overflows with expert portraiture of some of the most colorful of the key players in the field—e.g., the heteroclite military man who remade his wing of NASA into something leaner and meaner, the brilliant hippie rocket scientists who live in NoCal communes, the autodidact New Zealand rocketeer, the dodgy Ukrainian oligarch whose parents worked for the Soviet aerospace program—but it often fails as journalism because it avoids the big questions that need asking, busy as it is cheering on the rocket fantasies of clever men (almost all of them are men) without considering the consequences. You don’t have to be Kaczynski to think the end result may not be great.
If a clearly bright person like Vance truly hasn’t considered the pitfalls of the aggressive militarization and endless spying from the sky, he may be too deep inside the private space industry’s “shared hallucination,” as he terms it. His epic-scale tinkerers convince themselves they're bestowing upon earthlings the greatest gifts imaginable, never thinking any further than the next countdown. (When one of them offers sneering disdain for the Humanities, you’ll likely not be shocked.) What seems to actually motivate these rocket boys is the desire to express their own cleverness, as well as their hypercompetitiveness, and we’re to follow wherever these personality traits lead them, even if it’s astray. As Vance traversed the globe to watch a slew of tense liftoffs in doing reportage for his volume, he may have believed he was writing about Prometheus, but there’s just as good a chance he was unwittingly covering Icarus. I don’t believe he’s that naive, though. It’s a case of an author having a thesis sentence that sold a book and sticking to it.
He was sure the moment was right for space initiatives to be offloaded to the private sector.
The last-ditch 2008 mission of Falcon 1 rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX surprisingly met with success, and it’s often seen as the seminal moment for private-space speculation. It was clearly influential, though Vance identifies the heterodox Air Force veteran General Simon P. “Pete” Worden as the father of the movement. The ultimate inside/outside man, Worden was a key figure in Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the much-lambasted “Star Wars” program, but he also found himself frequently kicked from post to post because his outspokenness pissed off superiors. In Silicon Valley parlance, he moved fast and broke things, acting more the swashbuckler than an officer with a ready salute. For decades he’d been NASA's chief internal critic, believing the agency had transformed from world-beater to bureaucratic boneyard, with Alabama Senator Richard Shelby the most stalwart opponent of progress, repeatedly killing innovation elsewhere to keep jobs in his home state. (Alabama was the cradle of American space exploration because it was in Huntsville where the postwar U.S. government stowed Wernher von Braun and numerous other Nazi rocketeers, “bleached” their heinous pasts, and transformed them into all-American heroes.) When Worden noticed the dwindling cost of hardware and software reaching a tipping point, recognizing that both rockets and satellites could now be produced at a much lower cost, he was sure the moment was right for space initiatives to be offloaded to the private sector, especially when billions in venture capital began to flow into the category in the wake of Falcon 1 making its mark. (If it ever occurred to Worden that private companies possessing this power might lead to unintended consequences, a vital point, you won’t learn about it from this book.)
It’s not surprising, then, that in his fifties Worden found himself a key figure, the key figure, in the hand-off of space technology from NASA to civilian inventors. Named in 2006 as the first director of the then-sleepy Ames Research Center, which was wedged in between Silicon Valley start-up cities Mountain View and Sunnyvale, the maverick spent close to a decade dodging the admonitions of his superiors and turning the facility into a experimental hybrid outfit, doing government business while also partnering with the bigfoots at Google and small-scale innovators who were dreaming up next-gen tools. Helping Worden was a group of brilliant hippie scientists he first encountered by chance at a Houston restaurant in 2002 during the International Astronautical Congress. They were “youthful space nerds,” students introduced to him by one of his friends, who asked the group if they wanted to meet “Darth Vader.” They heatedly debated the militarization of space, which the grad-school set vehemently opposed and the Reagan and Dubya Administration alumnus wholeheartedly supported. A few years later some of these young people, doctorates in hand, were Worden’s prize recruits at Ames, despite the yawning philosophical divide that supposedly existed. Many of these self-styled peaceniks would ultimately accept military contracts when they’d go on, post-Ames, to start their own businesses.
Hippie science is nothing new, of course. Consider that in 1967, counterculture icon Richard Brautigan, though bored to tears while serving as poet in residence at the California Institute of Technology, composed his poem/manifesto about being blissfully all watched over by machines of loving grace. Or of Timothy Leary in the late Seventies, nestled in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains, turning his attention from macrodosing to microcomputers: “Space migration is what I’m working on right now.” (Leary did make it into space two decades later, though posthumously.) There was something different this time, though, because “Pete’s Kids,” as they unfortunately came to be known, arrived on the scene at a moment when computerized utopianism seemed like it could be more than just a hopeful poem or vague plan. Moore’s Law had brought rocketeering to an inflection point, and Worden tasked his charges with aggressively experimenting with sending satellites into space on the cheap, urging them to do whatever was necessary to upset NASA’s status quo. “There was this weird movement, and it was really fun, man,” recalls scientist Chris Boshuizen. It does sound weird sometimes. Vance refers to the “religion of space engineering” and one of Worden’s chosen ones recalls it as “something like a crusade.” You may begin to think there were some unfortunate similarities between Ames of this era and other California cults.
Physicist Will Marshall, one the Houston group who were “united by idealism,” or so we’re told, accepted Worden’s overture. He and a coworker delighted their boss by brainstorming the NASA PhoneSat project, in which smartphones were launched into space to take photos and videos for cheap, achieving some real success with the artful hack. Marshall and some of the other young Ames scientists started a communal living space they dubbed “Rainbow Mansion,” experimenting as ambitiously with the family structure as they had with propulsion systems. It’s not a bad thing to do, but there were no-boundary rules that couldn’t be refused, like the one that prohibited roommates from having locks on their doors, which made it possible for anyone to enter any room at any time. And Marshall made his appeal to prospective tenants with eye-rolling ads on Craigslist (e.g., “Seeking a driven, passionate, young female who wants to change the world”). When home-seekers who weren’t too freaked out by the listings moved in, it was no less over-the-top. “When new people came into the house,” we’re told, “Marshall sometimes interrogated them about their work and life choices: What are you doing? Why are you doing that? What’s the end purpose?” He was trying to hector them into a meaningful life and like a lot of idealists he really needed to calm the fuck down. As was the case with many others molded by Worden at Ames, Marshall eventually struck out on his own, founding mini-satellite company Planet Labs, which boasts of its “mission to image all of Earth’s landmass every day.” The company’s motto is “Improve Life on Earth from Space,” but it sounds like Marshall is still just up in everybody’s business.
The biggest personality Vance found working in the field is the Ukrainian investor Max Polyakov, who may have main character syndrome but certainly lives up to the billing.
In addition to Planet Labs, Vance focuses primarily on three other outfits in the category: Astra, Rocket Labs and Firefly. Each was initially motivated by the success of Falcon 1, identifying an opening in the market when SpaceX shifted to larger rockets, Musk doing so because there wasn’t enough business in the short term for relatively small crafts, and military contracts required rockets capable of handling large payloads. His spiritual heirs believed, mostly correctly, that the decreasing size of satellites, the kind being produced by Planet Labs, would lead to a near-term need for regular launches—rockets on demand, even—and set about trying to realize this demanding new schedule. Astra, founded in 2016, aspires to be the “FedEx of space,” to get stuff up there absolutely, positively overnight, or at least something close to that timeline. But rocket science is difficult. Vance documents the painful moments when the firm has multiple launches in succession go disastrously sideways—sometimes literally sideways—as co-founder Chris Kemp, another Ames alumnus, faced the mounting debacles with the unwavering confidence of a sociopath, always prepared to twist another agonizing defeat into the thrill of victory. He’s not the only one in the rocket biz to play fast and loose with the truth, but he’s particularly dedicated to the craft.
The most successful and gifted pioneer in this entire Space Race iteration is likely the New Zealand rocketeer Peter Beck, founder of Rocket Labs. The small, remote nation has never exactly been an aerospace hotbed, and Beck, not formally educated beyond high school, has made himself into something of a one-man space program. Having somehow survived his teen years without blowing himself up with rocket-powered bicycles and jetpacks of his own design, or the propellant fuel needed to make them go zoom, Beck went on to work on tools at a dishwasher manufacturer and did a stint in a government research lab. “All the while rocketry had been Beck’s hobby,” Vance writes of the monomaniacal engineer, who worked resolutely on his passion in his off-hours. The weekend warrior eventually made his avocation into a vocation, essentially willing a rocket company into existence, even managing to secure Silicon Valley money without much in the way of connections. To this point, he’s had as much success as anyone getting these nouveau crafts where they’re supposed to go, making it almost forgivable that he blasts Star Wars soundtrack music on a continuous loop at his headquarters.
The largest personality Vance found in the field, and clearly his favorite, is the voluble Ukrainian investor Max Polyakov, who may have main character syndrome but certainly lives up to the billing. A Ukrainian “legitimate businessman” who made hundreds of millions from dodgy Internet dating and gaming websites that certainly seem fraudulent, the ever-quotable, two-fisted Oban drinker has an ego as big as Texas. It’s in that state where Polyakov, in 2017, landed to rescue the indie spacecraft company Firefly, which showed promise but had recently ceased operations due to a lack of cash and a legal squabble with Virgin Galactic. It was founded by Tom Markusic, a devoutly religious NASA and SpaceX veteran who believes he’s “on a mission from God to spread human intelligence throughout the universe.” (Oh, dude, why do that to those nice aliens?) As ignoble as he was in his other businesses, Polyakov had a track record of being noble when it came to space exploration, having donated large sums to research programs at Ukrainian universities. He hoped to further expand the field by bestowing trade secrets amassed during the glory years of Ukrainian space research upon the Lone Star State.
Polyakov is normally a coldblooded wheeler-dealer, but he possesses a childlike appreciation of rockets and America. Space, he earnestly exclaims, is “the final frontier,” perhaps leading you to believe that Gene Roddenberry should have been less subtle with his metaphors about multiculturalism and post-scarcity. That situational naivete cost the investor: The $40 to $50 million he planned to spend on the project unsurprisingly ballooned to more than $200 million, the error part of trial and error always significant in the space business. Frantic about the mounting losses, Polyakov unleashed drunken, profane tirades at Markusic, who was clearly willing to toss his savior over the side at the first opportunity. Worst of all, the U.S. didn’t love him back despite all his adoration for the country (particularly its lightly regulated Texas and its inexpensive domestic beers), the government not wanting American space intelligence falling into the hands of foreign investors, especially one they suspected had ties to the Kremlin. When Firefly defied the odds and got close to making the leap from surviving to thriving, the powers that be in D.C. placed regulatory barriers in front of the company until Polyakov was pushed out. The boisterous businessman’s desire to aid aerospace development was realized, but the ensuing recognition and riches escaped him. Polyakov’s embittered departure from America was mitigated somewhat when he sold his Silicon Valley home and relocated his family to Scotland, home of the Oban distillery.
How ingenious it all is, but to what end?
Vance completed his book during the early stages of the Russian invasion of Polyakov’s home country. The writer crows about how the preponderance of newly orbiting satellites made it possible to prove Russia was lying about stocking troops at the border and permitted Ukrainians to continue receiving Internet service even after the siege began. We’re clearly supposed to be inspired that the new Space Race has aided the Ukrainian military in trying to repel the Kremlin’s desire for hegemony, and it certainly has its benefits, but it’s also reminiscent of the way Twitter was celebrated throughout the Arab Spring a dozen years earlier. You can debate social media’s actual efficacy during the numerous uprisings against tyranny in Muslim countries from 2010-2012, which was real but likely overstated at the time, but so much praise was lavished on these new communications devices that could disrupt governments without a thought to what havoc that ability could wreak in the future. By the Brexit referendum and the American Presidential Election of 2016, these same tools, now weaponized by bad actors, were used to create chaos and aid wannabe despots. A similar pattern will be the case with Vance’s beloved next-level rockets and mini-satellites, especially as the information they combine to collect is more often connected to AI systems that can process gigantic amounts of data instantaneously. There are upsides and there are downsides to these increasingly omnipresent technologies, and you avoid the latter at your own peril. (It has been reported since Vance completed his book that Musk refused Ukraine’s request to allow the invaded nation to use his Starlink satellite broadband system to launch a drone attack response against Russian ships.)
When one technologist in Vance’s volume speaks eagerly of the possibility of super-powerful satellites the size of a deck of cards, I was reminded that in Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire on the Moon, a 1970 book about the Apollo 11 moon mission that grew out of a series of articles he’d written for Life magazine, the pugnacious prose writer had predicted “computers the size of a package of cigarettes [that would] be able to do the work of present computers the size of a trunk.” Before five decades had passed, smartphones had arrived to fulfill his prophecy. It was Mailer, more than anyone, who seemed at the time to understand the ramifications of the Apollo 11 mission that first landed astronauts on the moon. It was seen by many as the greatest triumph of human ingenuity, the apotheosis of our species, but the writer understood it as the beginning of our end, that we would soon live inside “the windowless walls of the computer city,” that the machines had ascended, with our help, to a level we’d never attain. It was the start of a new way of life without an OFF switch. Sure, Mailer’s prose was hyperbolic, his massive ego outraged it was no longer to the be the center of the universe: “In the society of computer-logic, the atmosphere would obviously be plastic, air-conditioned, sealed in bubble-domes below the smog, a prelude to living on space stations. People would die in such societies like fish expiring on a vinyl floor.” However, in the big picture I don’t know that he was wrong, though the author would have probably been shocked that the rebellious longhairs led the way for the onslaught of algorithms. He wrote at the time that “there would be another society, an irrational society of dropouts, the saintly, the mad, the militant and the young. There the art of the absurd would reign in defiance against the computer.” These rebels sound a whole lot like Pete’s Kids, minus the defiance.
How ingenious it all is, but to what end? Humans will no doubt keep poking around in space and taking endless pictures of ourselves and every other thing, not because of how the computers are wired but because of how we are. But we should probably be posing very tough queries about these “advances” to minimize the damage, which Vance steadfastly fails to do, too busy focusing on the “core of human striving” and other such grandiosity. I was careful, though, to write earlier that the book almost never reveals how its subjects feel about the problematic future they’re building through the rapid industrialization of space. There is one exception, buried in three brief sentences within the nearly 500 pages of the oh wow! wonder and awe. The speaker is Les Martin, an ex-Marine who did stints at SpaceX and Virgin Galactic before becoming the Head of Infrastructure at Astra. He’s a straight-shooting hired gun who sort of fell into the business, never having desired to become a rocket man. He instead dreamed as a child of playing for the Dallas Cowboys or being a paleontologist, so for him launching payloads is merely a payday. Martin chafes at the duplicity of his ego-driven bosses, and their outlandish dreams of wealth and fame, skeptical as he is about the entire enterprise. “And what’s it all for?” he asks of the billions being spent to turn space into yet another office park. “I don’t see the need for it. It doesn’t make sense.” Despite his misgivings, Martin continues to work for aerospace companies, though just before this book was published he established a side business raising Quarter Horses in Texas. It’s a messy job, but he’s no stranger to horseshit.•
The Guest (Emma Cline)
This harrowing 2023 novel by Emma Cline is many things, and one of them is a clever riff on John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” with the series of Long Island pools the protagonist in that 1964 short story passes through on his way home replaced by a succession of mattresses. In the book, a pilled-up 22-year-old woman named Alex, whose life as a New York City escort has careered into a predictably bad place, is ejected from the Hamptons abode of her wealthy, much-older boyfriend after she damages his prized automobile and participates in an embarrassing scene at his friend’s dinner. She convinces herself the breakup is only temporary and she’ll be back in his good graces at his Labor Day party the next week when she shows up uninvited, even after glomming his expensive watch and pain pills on the way out the door. That gives Alex six days to kill and nowhere to live. She can’t go back to the city because right before she left she quietly made off with her drug-dealing boyfriend’s cash and stash. Luckily Alex doesn’t mind crashing on couches any more than she does crashing parties. She maneuvers herself inside a series of nearby handsome homes, doing and saying anything required to gain entry, playing whatever the role calls for, while raiding her hosts’ medicine cabinets, stealing petty cash and ultimately upsetting the equilibrium of their well-appointed houses with her shambolic energy.
“Could you live like this forever, in some alternate universe ruled by immediacy?” Alex wonders at the train station after impetuously insinuating herself into a large pack of teenagers. They’re totally stoked about their house party and she’s quick-witted enough to fast-talk her way into the circle, everyone assuming someone else knows her, and off she goes with the group. Her drinking and drugging is at first much more tolerated among a group of rowdy adolescents, but Alex only makes it through a single night with the revelers as she soon lands in the wrong guy’s bed and is shown the door. She repeats a similar pattern several times, stealing reflexively and lying easily, manipulating men, women, lonely teenage girls and grade-school children to keep herself afloat. Despite her persistently sketchy behavior, she remains a sympathetic figure during these increasingly desperate encounters, so lost and alone even when with others.
Another person who’s largesse she abuses is the caretaker of a wealthy man’s home who recognizes her from a party she’d attended with her boyfriend before she got the heave-ho. Nicholas, having just returned to the Hamptons to prepare the spread for his boss, sees Alex from his car and offers her a ride, before kindly, if a little reluctantly, agreeing to make her a meal at the manse. It isn’t long before she’s imposing way too much, and doing damage, accidentally, to valuable artwork. She tries to make up for her miscues with an offer of sex, which only causes the vibe to further deteriorate. Nicholas quickly regrets his goodwill and away she’s sent again. Almost everyone wants Alex away. Before ordering her from the home, he angrily asks her, while letting her know he was always aware she was that type of person, “Do you think it’s not obvious? What your deal is? You think I can’t tell?”
“Could you live like this forever, in some alternate universe ruled by immediacy?”
Alex is high for pretty much the whole shebang, though for the longest time she maintains enough self-awareness, despite the booze and pills and coke. If she can’t quite name her problem, she certainly recognizes its face. You might initially think that in her drug haze she’s overreacting to how she’s perceived by others, as the troubled woman is always fearful that people are looking at her warily and sizing her up accurately. But she’s more perceptive than paranoid. In addition to the caretaker’s brutally revealing comments, Alex is quickly rebuffed by a former running mate from NYC, another escort she knows, whom she randomly crosses paths with in a Hamptons restaurant. Before even a minute of polite conversation can be completed, the other woman coolly rebuffs Alex. “I really don’t care to be involved in your shit anymore,” she’s sternly told. A person from New York she hasn’t seen in a while angrily hangs up on her when she calls to ask for help. She’s wronged so many people and is welcome nowhere by anyone who knows her even a little, so she’s a reliable source as it concerns her pariah status.
Helping to keep Alex somewhat tethered to reality is her phone, which jolts to life every now and then with a threatening text from that drug dealer she wronged, a harsh reminder that her life is circling the drain, that time may be running out. The cell only works intermittently throughout her walkabout due to the patchy signal in the Hamptons and because she managed to get it waterlogged during one of her misadventures. In the beach-town milieu, it’s difficult for an unsteady person to avoid the perils of water, which is everywhere: the ocean, swimming pools, hot tubs. So easy to take comfort in all that water, as she often swims and soaks, but so easy to drown in it.
The final few days before the Labor Day soiree are spent with a troubled seventeen year-old boy she meets at the beach. Jack is at war with his Hollywood producer dad, and there are offhand comments about him being off his meds and some type of distressing, possibly violent, behavior toward a former girlfriend. Of all the people she meets along the way, Alex has most in common with disturbed Jack, which isn’t surprising by this point in the novel. She drinks her way through a tense dinner with the teen and his father, before she and the boy break into the unoccupied home of the ex he’d terrified in some way. They shack up, get high, pass time. Even in her increasing stupor, Alex realizes she needs to get away from Jack, the sooner the better.
Some critics have referred to this book as a psychological novel, and it certainly has *almost* all the earmarks.
Shit-faced and clear-eyed can only last for so long, though. As is the case with the central figures in Joy Williams’ The Changeling and Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-two in the Shade, where the protagonists are so deep into their addictions that they can’t trust their own perceptions, and neither can the reader, Alex’s senses finally become too clouded for her to comprehend much, taking the narrative off the rails with her as Labor Day finally arrives. Some critics have referred to this book as a psychological novel, and it certainly has almost all the earmarks. Cline is able to locate perceptive descriptions of motives around every corner, succinctly explaining one wealthy Hamptons doyenne this way: “People like Helen loved to display the artifacts of creativity as if that implicated her in the process.”
So it’s puzzling that Cline, so insightful about mind and behavior, wants us to see Alex’s actions as “motiveless crimes.” It’s not just a matter of refusing to assign a trite cause for the woman’s errant conduct—e.g., she was abused in this way at that age by this person—because, yeah, that’s a cheap trick. But the author wants us to accept that her character’s jaw-dropping spiral comes out of nowhere, that it knows no provenance. When one put-upon person who’s tired of Alex’s crap asks in exasperation, “Why are you like this?” she thinks about it for a moment. We’re told this: “There wasn’t any reason. There had never been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary.” These are Alex’s thoughts but they certainly appear to also be the author speaking to us, not some rationalization on the part of the character. It would have been better for the writer, whose first novel, The Girls, also focused on young women coming undone, to have left the matter unsaid than to insist on the absence of motivation. It’s a baffling choice in an otherwise excellent novel.•
Technologies of the Human Corpse (John Troyer)
John Troyer, a second-generation undertaker and the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, intended this 2020 volume to be an academic textbook about the tools, processes, and philosophies, past and present, used in mortuary science, but life intervened. Actually, death did. In 2017, the author’s younger sister, a mother of two preschool children, was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain cancer, after he’d begun writing, and died at the young age of 43, before he’d finished. This tragedy, along with his aged father’s deteriorating health, understandably had an outsize impact on the book project and instead of a solely scholarly work something more personal emerged: a pastiche of memoir, history, and poetry.
Troyer and his sister were raised in Midwest America by a funeral director and death educator, and for them it was just the family business, if an unusual one that causes some people discomfort. As unfair as it is, the undertaker may historically be as unpopular as the executioner, with one laying us low, the other hanging us high, but both reminding us of our brief window of consciousness. The siblings’ ubiquitous exposure to the dead and their mourners planted within them a shared sense of gallows humor, a characteristic which usually springs from an overdose of solemnity. Did the extreme familiarity with dying ready Troyer for his sister’s rapid demise? Yes and no. He was able to speak frankly to her about her dire diagnosis when her medical caregivers were being less than candid, which she appreciated, but when she passed, Troyer was, despite his experience and expertise, one more bereft person at a bedside, just another griever crying in an airport. Preparing bodies after death had not prepared him much more than the rest of us to face a loved one’s death.
This book doesn’t reach back to ancient rites, young kings buried in golden coffins, instead beginning its focus on the Nineteenth Century, an epochal era in his industry when technology transformed not just the nature of burial but also the very definition of death, making it, more or less, modern. The writer details those Industrial Age products like cameras, railroads and embalming tools, each of which in their own way annihilated space and time, allowing the corpse to be commodified in new ways. Early photography, with its spirit photos and corpse photos (like Man Ray’s 1922 famous postmortem portrait of Marcel Proust) enabled people to retain a relationship of sorts with the deceased beyond the frailty of the human memory. Railroads that newly snaked around America made it possible to readily transport deceased bodies to loved ones who could now sorrow over them directly. Embalming tools, naturally, had a much larger effect than any other means. For the first time, the process of decay could be held at bay.
This innovation gave birth to a golden age of necroeconomics, potentially turning each breathless body into an “object of vast capital potential.”
The American Civil War was the first military engagement to know the presence of embalmers, who worked in camps, on battlefields, in government hospitals, even setting up shop in nearby railway stations. It was in the postbellum period, however, in 1902, when an unusually large-scale demonstration in Milwaukee of the Bisga Embalming Fluid, the brainchild of embalmer/inventor Carl Lewis Barnes, permanently changed the face of death. It was the heretofore best of the “technologies that seemingly stopped the general public from seeing the visible effects of death.” More than 50 corpses treated with the formula were displayed for industry representatives, the product so good that the exhibition became a landmark in mortuary science, permanently altering the way corpses were treated (in both senses of the word). It was the “Mother of All Demos” among the dead set, making it plain that those no longer alive could now be lifelike. This innovation gave birth to a golden age of necroeconomics, potentially turning each breathless body into an “object of vast capital potential.” At its best, undertaking helps those robbed of loved ones to attain some sense of closure, but Big Funeral has, like any other for-profit business, financial gain at its root.
As Troyer explains, some truisms persist in the death business. One is that human remains have a price tag as well as a toe tag. Grave robbers, or resurrectionists, who shoveled up cemeteries to supply universities with fresh bodies are grisly figures of an earlier age, their actions the stuff of macabre lore, but the ghoulish vocation, often conducted stealthily and illegally, continues apace in other forms. The book doesn’t go too deeply into the history of the human flesh trade, but I’ll provide two examples. In his autobiography, Diego Rivera tells of subsisting on human meat for a month of his youth, pooling money with friends to purchase fresh bodies from local medical schools, cooking and eating the flesh. He reported to have remained in hale condition during the culinary experiment. Benjamin Harrison, a decade prior to becoming President, investigated a number of Ohio medical colleges in search of the stolen corpse of a deceased family friend, and came face to face with his own freshly fallen father. Imagine his horror! The book looks at recent scandals, including the theft of Alistair Cooke’s bones by a body parts ring, which mostly continue to center around medical schools needing “classroom materials” (spines currently go for $1,500; shoulders $431). The “quasi-invisible economy” run by body brokers remains a grim reality.
The 1970s were, for Troyer, “the crucial decade that everyone should study,” a period which saw the widespread philosophical reconsideration of death. The growth of the Death Awareness Movement, also called the Happy Death Movement, was ignited by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ seminal 1969 book, On Death and Dying. It was an opportunity to earnestly discuss and demythologize death, to treat the topic with a candor previously absent, in encounter groups, a forerunner to today’s “Death Cafe.” The author’s favorite book from the era, and one he endeavored to get back into print, is Lyn Lofland’s far less well known The Craft of Dying, which examined the rapid changes in that decade, as activist groups encouraged death acceptance and academia began to offer formal studies about death. In the big picture, this decade’s incipient movement dovetailed with the beginning of the AIDS plague, when not only gay people but also their corpses faced great bigotry, and likely also had an influence on the activism that arose against this backlash.
The ethical gap between the tools we create and the way we use them to elongate life will only get more tangled in wires as we progress.
The Seventies were also when meditation began in earnest on the “meanings of life and death in an age of biomedical machines.” One struggle over the uneasy dance between death and technology from that period that the book mentions only in passing is the sad case of Karen Ann Quinlan, a young New Jersey woman who, in 1975, had a severe reaction to a blend of tranquilizers and alcohol, collapsing. A roommate kept her alive with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then machines took over, keeping the comatose woman’s heart beating even though she no longer had any brain activity or chance of recovery. After doctors refused her family’s request to remove her from a respirator and allow her to die with “grace and dignity,” her parents filed a lawsuit to have their daughter disconnected from machines, finally succeeding a year later, on appeal. (Quinlan lived nine more years after being “unplugged,” finally dying in 1985.) The court case forced a debate on bioethics questions that an increasingly technological world required. As Troyer notes in a late chapter that looks at the future, the ethical gap between the tools we create and the way we use them to elongate life will only get more tangled in wires as we progress.
The most controversial part of the book is probably the chapter on Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds, a traveling exhibition of “plastinated” human and animal remains that have been embalmed with a special fluid allowing them greater flexibility. The impresario poses some of these human corpses in sexual positions, mating those opposites, death and desire. (Von Hagens is no grave robber by the way; he’s reportedly received so many offers from people who want their corpses to be used in his strange menagerie that he no longer accepts such overtures.) While acknowledging that this P.T. Barnum of necrophilia is probably doing his “art” just to turn a profit, the author clearly believes some good can come from such a display, thinking the playfulness of the exhibition can steal some of the efficacy from the grim reaper. Just the very idea completely repulses me on a gut level which may just be a product of my own unexplored feelings, but I also don’t think it possesses much of the mitigating effect the writer believes it does, and his book is my prime evidence. Troyer punctuates each section with a heartfelt “Watching My Sister Die” poem, an attempt to work through his remorse, a process that will never be completed. No matter what we do, death retains power—it remains undefeated. His book in the big picture, though, is a bold attempt to encourage us to discuss what it means to be a mere mortal. Troyer will certainly be talking about it, considering his company. As he writes in his preface, “the dead are exceptionally good listeners.”•
Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan)
It’s fair to be suspicious of those among us who are beloved by all. How often have they looked the other way when someone powerful behaved unpleasantly or worse? How many times have they bitten their tongues when an inconvenient truth needed telling? Popularity can come at a dear cost. That truth is at the crux of Claire Keegan’s succinct 2020 novel about a working-class Irish father of five daughters who finds it increasingly difficult to turn away when he accidentally becomes aware of the mistreatment of children at a nearby Magdalene Laundries, a Catholic institution for pregnant teens and girls deemed “problems.” His wife, severely pragmatic, chastens him when she observes how the cruel reality has shaken him, urging her spouse to focus on their girls rather than someone else’s, not wanting her family to upset their small town’s influential church authorities. “If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on,” she advises. She’s not wrong on the face of it, but answering tyranny with apathy isn’t easy for a certain kind of person.
Coal merchant Bill Furlong is just such a soul. He was himself a child born out of wedlock, his mother a mere girl working as a servant when she became pregnant. If not for her uncommonly generous employer sheltering and caring for them throughout his childhood, Furlong’s teenage mom could have been one of the tens of thousands of girls who landed in a Magdalene Laundries, a chain of supposed asylums for “fallen women” that was essentially a labor camp in which children were severely abused, at the minimum, emotionally. Maybe Furlong would have died as a baby as did many born on the grounds of the Magdalene locations, his tiny body tossed in a mass grave with other infants who’d perished. Now in 1985, he has a steady-if-small business, a thrifty wife and a quintet of children faring well in Catholic school and music classes. The economy is shaky and the fear of falling lives in the pit of his stomach, but the family has made it intact as another Christmas approaches. They’re blessed, he knows.
It’s fair to be suspicious of those among us who are beloved by all.
Far less favored are the girls he meets when he makes an unannounced early coal delivery to the nearby Magdalene. With no nun present to supervise him upon his arrival, one of the sad-looking waifs who labors in the institution desperately begs him to take her away from the laundry or at least drive her to the river so she can drown herself. It’s clearly not just histrionics. Furlong is instantly haunted, but takes no action beyond telling his wife who sternly offers him the aforementioned counsel to mind his own. On a subsequent trip to Magdalene, he finds a girl padlocked inside a shed who’d recently given birth, distraught that she’s not allowed to nurture her newborn. This time he can’t control himself and frees the freezing girl and escorts her inside the convent. The Mother Superior is ticked and clearly wants him to leave ASAP, but he purposefully lingers making sure she knows he’s aware there are horrors afoot. In return, she makes clear that his daughters’ attendance at the church-run local schools, the only local schools, isn’t guaranteed. The next time Furlong appears at Magdalene will be Christmas Eve and he’ll make a decision that seems impetuous but has been quietly buried within him his whole life.
The Magdalene Laundries, founded in the late Eighteenth Century to supposedly “reform” prostitutes, were tragically in existence until the 1990s, with the church and state complicitous in using the children forcibly held there like drudges, working them like slaves. You might think these clothes-washing operations were a cash cow, but records examined in the aftermath have shown they weren’t particularly profitable. The raison d'être of the enterprise was to accuse, scapegoat and punish. These “troubled” girls were sometimes pregnant teens whose babies were ultimately given up for adoption. Some of the children were simply deemed too “wild.” Oftentimes they had been sexually abused by relatives and were wounded and acting out. It was an easy way for the government to keep a problem out of sight and out of mind. The children were routinely tormented, told they were bad. There were later discovered makeshift graves on the properties where girls who’d died were surreptitiously buried. The deaths were unreported, the graves unmarked. The girls had no say in the hard labor, the haranguing, the loss of their children, none of it. Only when enough Magdalene survivors bravely spoke up, their voices becoming a chorus, was attention finally paid.
The deaths were unreported, the graves unmarked.
There are two types of successful novels: ones overstuffed and overwritten, where you accept the questionable that’s intertwined with the incredible, and those where you wouldn’t change a word. Keegan’s thin slice of a novel is in the latter category, its prose perfect as a well-executed poem, which it had to be considering its brevity. There are a couple of points you’ll have to consider. You can question Keegan’s decision to center her story on the heroic impulses of her protagonist. Plenty of people had to have known what was going on with Magdalene, but hardly anyone said anything for the longest time, either indifferent, or cowed by the vast authority of the Roman Catholic orders. Such heroes were scarce. It’s curious as well that men get off easy in this novel, women being the chief culprits in the book: the nuns, Furlong’s wife, a shopkeeper who offers him some “friendly” advice about his behavior at the convent. The power behind the church and state in Ireland in 1985 was patriarchal, yet that reality remains absent in the narrative. The author does use her modest word count expertly, though, in revealing not just the thoughts and actions of her principal characters but also the ecosystem that allowed such terror to not only occur but to persist. Keegan knows it takes a village to nurture or harm at such a scale.•
The Stronghold (Dino Buzzati)
A son of Kafka, a father of Beckett, the mid-century Italian writer/painter Dino Buzzati had a way of getting under the skin, as all artists do if they’re successful in tapping into something visceral that feels like a secret you’ve learned while asleep, an answer that’s come to you in a troubled dream. His newly re-titled and re-translated 1945 philosophical novel, The Stronghold (formerly known as The Tartar Steppe), is just such a hallucinatory vision, a pre-Godot waiting game. The existential fable focuses on youthful Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, who’s been assigned to a far-flung fortezza, a dismal and forgotten fortress abutted to the north by impenetrable mountains and to the south by forbidding desert. The troops await day after day for an attack from an enemy, the “Tartars,” a siege which appears to never be coming from an adversary that seems to not exist. It’s a life predicated on myths, and an appointment at the fort is considered more punishment than reward, though Drogo’s done nothing wrong. Young military men choose the locale for only one reason: It’s such an unattractive posting that they’re awarded double the service time for a two-year hitch, which allows them to get a leg up in their military careers. Drogo, however, has been assigned without his request, and he’s been given no terminus for his remote service.
“From a distance it creates a certain effect,” a commanding officer tells Drogo upon his arrival at the border redoubt called Bastiani Fortress, acknowledging that while it may look interesting from afar, it’s sort of a walled-in, unimpressive edifice surrounded by rocks and sand once you arrive. He may be underselling the fort, though, because even though it’s an eyesore, there’s something oddly compelling about it all. It’s near a mountain and it’s somehow magic. Drogo, however, immediately wants out, desiring a return to the city where he can enjoy his leisure time at parties, cafes and bars. He speaks frankly of his dissatisfaction to his superior, requesting an immediate transfer, overwhelmed by an ominous feeling that he may otherwise be trapped forever. The older man, no doubt having many times already faced this reflexive desire of young officers to flee from the decrepit fort, tries to finesse the situation, asking Drogo to stay for four months and then when his next physical is given, the superior will fudge the result, writing that the altitude is bad for the younger man’s “heart problem.” Very reluctantly, Drogo agrees.
They choose faith over reality, becoming addicted to hope itself as they vigilantly await an opportunity that will likely never arrive.
“Don’t let the obsession take hold of you” the tailor warns Drogo, knowing the officer has months to pass in the strangely entrancing world before he can opt out. When the day finally arrives, however, the officer impetuously decides to forgo his opportunity to escape, not quite understanding the choice himself. It will be his last chance to walk away a young man, though you get the feeling some obstacle would have been placed before him had he elected to leave. The balance of the novel studies how Drogo’s fellow soldiers live in a state of perpetual anticipation as they’re forced to follow cruel regulations and conduct dangerous reconnaissance missions that have little value. They choose faith over reality, becoming addicted to hope itself as they vigilantly await an opportunity that will likely never materialize—the chance to be heroic and make their mark on history. Every one of their actions appears to be done in the service of something useless—it’s a Sisyphean slog, a somnambulant dance. Some die needlessly in keeping up the traditions of the fort, for failing to remember passwords and such. (These senseless deaths make this book, in its own way, the most low-key anti-war novel ever.) Drogo ages and declines, reaching the last stage of his life, his body deteriorating in concert with the fort crumbling around him. But, wait, is there finally some hope? Is that an enemy force that approaches? Will there at long last be some meaning to it all? Our hero tries to force himself to respond to the moment, but it looks unlikely that his health will allow him to. What the officer needs is some outrageous luck to permit him to be part of this long-awaited moment, but most of us aren’t so lucky, passing through life without opportunities for such grand gestures.
Buzzati read Kafka’s The Castle the year before writing The Stronghold, and the influence is certainly felt, but he’d also devoured the enigmatic Prague writer’s shorter fiction, The Metamorphosis included. As was the case with Gregor Samsa, the weight of an unwanted responsibility reduces Drogo over time, to the importance, if not the form, of an insect. Another literary kindred spirit for Buzzati’s book centers on entomology: Kōbō Abe’s 1962 novel, The Woman in the Dunes. That story’s amateur insect enthusiast is trapped beneath the earth by locals while he’s on a research trip to an isolated locale, kept prisoner in a sandpit that requires daily digging to protect the village, as the needs of society subsume the will of the individual. All these narratives, odd as they are, feel universal because we all serve certain roles we don’t desire during the brief experience of life, reduced by what society requires of us, by our attempts just to survive and by the sheer magnitude of it all.•