I’m familiar with Drew Magary’s work from Kissing Suzy Kolber and Deadspin, both of which are gone*. Magary’s writing is beautifully brutal, taking on power by calling things what they are (see the footnote for more on that). That type of writing is why I picked up The Postmortal, and while the novel is different (a bit less manic, a lot less funny, a lot more thought-out), it runs on that same sort of desperate, wow-we-are-so-screwing-this-all-up energy, a power that feels absolutely spot-on at this cultural moment.
Thoughts:
- This novel focuses on what happens when, once again, we simply introduce a technology without considering its consequences. In this case we get the cure for aging, and our government actually tries to hold back on it, but the beginning of violent agitations for and against as well as doctors who make a lot of money by providing the cure on the black market leads elected officials to throw up their hands and say go for it…
- Even this protagonist, someone who is at best morally compromised as a lawyer and then end specialist, can’t keep going forever…and it feels like the only folks who do are religious fanatics and zealots or completely amoral, narcissistic bastards…not exactly the kind of future where the arc of morality and social justice bends ever-forward…
- It’s interesting how some of the sharpest critiques of technology have come from folks who have used the Intertoobz to write about sports. They have done so in ways that we could never have imagined previously, and reached audiences that are far larger and smarter than any sportswriter could have hoped for.
- Young , woke white guys like Spencer Hall, Will Leitch, and Magary (esp. with his “Why Your Team Sucks” feature on Deadspin) were far more prescient than many of us in understanding the exact effects that these same intertoobz, augmented by social media and all the other crap, would have on us as a culture.
- I’m sort of obsessed with ghosts right now (especially of the narrative variety), and they appear late in this novel. After the bombs start dropping, a person trying to escape tells the narrator, John Farrell, as he has to do his end specialist duty on a bunch of folks who couldn’t afford the sheep flu robocure (called Skeleton Key)…
‘I know why they’re sick. I know why the world got sick. Do you know?’ I didn’t answer her. She didn’t need my approval to go on. ‘It’s the ghosts who did this. I hear them. I feel them cozy up to me when I’m asleep on the ground. The ghosts aren’t happy with us. They saw us grab more life than they got, and they raged. They howled and they shook their chains, and they swore they’d get back at us for being on the right side of history. It’s the ghosts who have made this world sick. You don’t shortchange the dead. There’s a whole lot more of them than there are of us, and there always will be. You watch. They’ll claim us all.’
- Ghosts, and the ways we write them into our culture as hungry for experiences that they can never have, carry all kinds of weight, and Magary’s use of them here – as a fever dream seen by someone who sees the end of the world directly in front of them – posits a future that simply can’t handle all that ectoplasm.
By the end I was reading furiously and had to slow myself down. One of the reasons that I read is to see what really smart people are thinking about huge social problems, and Magary’s novel does exactly that…
*Deadspin still exists, but as you can read from the Wikipedia entry its staff has been decimated after its new corporate overlords told them to stick to sports and stay away from politics. For most of us, politics was why we went to Deadspin…they called out the racism of the NFL, the ridiculously anti-player stance of the MLB, and the NBA’s efforts to cozy up to the Chinese government, and they were one of the few websites to make me think that maybe I could love sports and be fully conscious and try to combat the problems with sports where I could…