Half Life by Shelley Jackson
|
What We're Reading:
|
"Half Life" by Shelley Jackson (HarperCollins, ISBN
0060882352, $24.95) Shelley Jackson is probably best known as the author of "Patchwork Girl," the "Frankenstein"-inspired hypertext novel. She walks the cutting edge of contemporary narrative, especially in her current project, Skins, a narrative told in words tattooed on 3,000 volunteers. For almost a decade, she's been finding new ways to make fiction. "Half Life" is her first novel, and it bears traces of the experimental narrative work Jackson has practiced before. Yet at the same time, "Half Life" is an immensely readable, comic, and absurdist novel that fans of "Geek Love," "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler," or "Gravity's Rainbow" can sink their postmodern claws into. It's an accessible experimental absurdist novel. In the novel's universe, nuclear fallout and radiation have made conjoined twins (known as "twofers") the 2nd largest minority population in the U.S. Political tensions arise between the "Togetherists" (those who believe conjoined twins represent the future of humanity) and the "Unity Foundation" (a small, anti-conjoined-twin terrorist group). Several splinter groups— such as the religious cult of the Siamystics— use Boolean operators and Venn diagrams to show how conjoined twins offer mystical insights into human nature. Some "singletons" believe so strongly in the power of "twofers," they wear additional prosthetic heads. The narrative is told by Nora Olney, one half of a set of conjoined twins. Her Siamese twin, Blanche, has been asleep for the last 15 years. In one of the three major plots, Nora wants to have Blanche removed from her body but, since medical ethics consider Blanche a person, Nora must find an underground surgeon willing to "unify" Nora. In another plot line, readers are given insights into Nora and Blanche's youth in Too Bad, Nevada, their time creating a museum of dead animals, and their friendship with a girl-in-a-box they name Donkey-skin. Thirdly, the novel is peppered with excerpts from "The Siamese Twin Reference Manual." Nora has cobbled this manual together from newspaper articles, interviews, pamphlets, leaflets, and notes. It's a narrative device that gives readers a chance to look widely and deeply at the world of this fiction, and the manual chapters are hilarious and bizarre. The chapters of the novel that center on Nora and Blanche's childhood neighbors, Dr. Goat and Donkey-skin, are pretty unsettling. But this plot line is given a peculiar twist at the end that questions whether the two ever existed or were merely part of Nora's imagination. In fact, the last section of the novel starts to put into question many of the events that had occurred previously. Jackson pushes the limits of rational storytelling, but her experimental sentences are an ideal vehicle for the absurdist universe she creates. "Half Life" is a challenging novel and, though I found the third section lagging (it's Nora's paranoid diary, complete with footnotes), as a whole is rewardingly complex. For this reason alone, I think "Half Life" might merit a second reading. Given time, I will read it again. I recommend "Half Life" for intrepid readers who enjoy unexpected and absurd plots, language games, and black comedy. Review by Jeff Hibbert, January 18, 2007
|
