Foe (cont'd), We Keep The Dead Close, The Passenger (cont'd (sorta))
a series of gamer-brained guesses at what the twist of a not very good book is going to be
I recently wrote about how my book club picked Iain Reid’s Foe as our next book and how neither my girlfriend nor I are super into it because it does kind of the least interesting thing a story can do: be a story about withholding the story from you. The whole thing is waiting to be told what the twist is. This is a problem because, briefly borrowing from what I last wrote:
it doesn’t offer much else: the characters are largely nonexistent, way too many scenes of the narrator just thinking and asking the same questions over and over again, and the premise is still too far-fetched to not be suspicious. Like, it’s page after page of “isn’t this all suspicious?” and it’s like yeah of course, but what’s the story though? Is the story the tale of the reader brute-forcing through three hundred pages until the book just tells you what was going on, because it sure seems that way so far.
Additionally, I got suspicious of what the twist is going to be because, lowkey, I feel like I’ve played this video game story before. I’ve probably played better versions of this story, which actually contained a story. Perhaps even characters.
To illustrate why “twisty” isn’t a “satisfying” reading experience (and why I implore you share my belief that a twist is not a story), here I present to you a rough timeline of at which point in the book I had which predictions, and leave to you to suggest whether I was making my own fun by spending all my time thinking about not the book I was reading, in lieu of the book offering anything itself.
Looking at the Book
The Clues Thus Far: The title is Foe
The Prediction: Looks like we got an antagonist in this one, folks
What Is The Book Giving Me To Do Until I Find Out: Figure out who the foe is! Or isn’t! What could it be!
Reading the Back of the Book
The Clues Thus Far: A married couple living in a remote, rural area is informed the husband is on the short-list to be conscripted into a space colony program, but don’t even worry about it they’re going to make a cyborg husband-clone for his wife.
The Prediction: I know there’s a twist because the back of the book literally has the word “twisty” on it, so someone is already the robot.
What Is The Book Giving Me To Do Until I Find Out: Honestly at this point the twist doesn’t even seem important. This premise is wild. I’m gonna have fun on this “here’s your robot husband, this is a normal thing to do!” journey!
Starting The Book
The Clues Thus Far: The representative of the company arrives to tell them about the short-list lottery and that he might be going to space and that they’re building a planet/spaceship/thing before trying to terraform a whole-ass planet. The husband - our narrator - describes how he doesn’t remember much of his past, particularly his life before meeting his wife
The Prediction: Ok, the main character is already the robot.
What Is The Book Giving Me To Do Until I Find Out: More importantly, he and his wife sure have some uncomfortable things to talk about. What delectable tension!
Halfway-ish
The Clues Thus Far: Husband is selected. Representative is moving in to study him to get data for the mission and for the robot. It takes a surprisingly long time to bring up the robot mentioned on the back of the book. Like… half the book. The story has revealed itself to be extremely insular: the husband and wife never talk to anyone else, or even go other places, really.
The Prediction: The lack of memories is suspicious. The lack of other people is supsicious. Where are they that any of this is plausible? Why don’t they talk to other people? Or go anywhere? Have they already done this? Is this a Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise “they keep taking away our memories and we keep doing the same thing over and over again” scenario?
What Is The Book Giving Me To Do Until I Find Out: At this point? Kinda just wait for something to progress, really.
A Character Once Thought Trustworthy May Not Be Trustworthy
The Clues Thus Far: Wife suggests she is not satisfied with her life. Husband is confused how this could be. Representative keeps asking questions, inserting himself into their lives, putting monitoring devices around or on the husband. Husband is suspicious he’s up to something. Wife starts to openly dislike her husband. Husband thinks representative is lying about the robot: he is going to replace the husband himself!
The Prediction: Is this a NieR: Automata “they keep taking away our memories and we keep doing the same thing over and over again, and also everyone is a robot” scenario?
What Is The Book Giving Me To Do Until I Find Out: Still waiting to see if anyone is a robot or not. And I guess if the husband snaps, possibly in a robot-like way.
Definitely Building Up To The Climax, Probably
The Clues Thus Far: Husband also starts recognizing how beautiful everything is around him while doing all of the above. The husband starts obsessing over his productivity and getting swole. He spends a lot of time standing still and staring at the wall.
The Prediction: Is this a 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim “they keep taking away our memories and we keep doing the same thing over and over again, and it turns out everyone is NOT a robot but it seemed that way because everything has been happening in VR the whole time” scenario? Are they already on the spaceship? Are they robots on the spaceship? Are there even people anymore? Wait, is this NieR: Automata?
What Is The Book Giving Me To Do Until I Find Out: Keep going back and forth on whether this is more similiar to one video game or another while the husband keeps saying things like “you know, something doesn’t seem right here” until the end of the book, probably.
The Twist Revealed
The Twist: Husband was the robot the whole time.
The Reader: Yeah, no shit.
I got the audiobook for We Keep the Dead Close (Becky Cooper), a true crime investigation of an unsolved murder at Harvard in 1969 that maybe Harvard covered up. Often a thing I like to do with ReadOnly is draw comparisons between two unlikely things, but the obvious connection between a psychological thriller fictional novel centered on an obvious twist and a nonfiction true crime book investigating a real murder is… it’s weird to frame a narrative about investigating who did a real-world murder as “a reveal”. It’s weird to suggest that, in structuring the book around the investigation, the toll the investigation took on the author, and the themes that come up along the way, such as the subjectivity of memory, the threat posed by the self-preservation of systems of power on individual people, and whether the plausibility that an institution could do something is terrifying whether or not it turns out it did, is “better” than a book that just dangles the idea of finding out by the end of the book, when one is fiction and the other is about a real murder.
My girlfriend and I have talked a bit lately about our complicated feelings about true crime. One of the first things we bonded over when we met was our mutual appreciation of the podcast My Favorite Murder, which we fell off of at different points over the years: for me, when they sold their production company to Amazon and the idea of Amazon making literal profit a few steps removed from literal murder felt too gross to me. My girlfriend has landed on the side of sticking with fiction (often the cozy side) to avoid the issue entirely. I think We Keep the Dead Close is done well so far, for the reasons mentioned above, for its focus on the life of the victim, for its greater point of how beyond being a lurid tale the reasons why it happened continue to present frightening plausibility. It grapples with that last point too; whether the warning or awareness justifies a messy relationship with becoming a consumer product. It is perhaps a tall order that every single true crime novel (or any other piece of media) grapple with the ethics of its genre to do it right, and for what?
If Eva was right, and Jane’s story functioned as a kind of cautionary tale, then perhaps it was less about the literal truth of what happened to Jane than it was an allegory about the dangers that faced women in academia. The idea reminded me of what Carl has said in that first class, that the past is often appropriated to suit the demands of the modern era: in this case, reporting abuses of power rarely results in meaningful change and often causes problems for the person bringing the complaint.
Jane’s story existed, perhaps, to voice injustices that otherwise couldn’t be easily raised. It followed, then, that the elements of Jane’s story might just be symbols. Jane stood for every woman in the department. Her killing represented a kind of academic silencing. And the professor who killed her? A symbol of the abuse of power in the institutional oppresion of women in academia. Viewed from this angle, Carl wasn’t the murderer at all; he was an imperfect man ensnared in a living myth, but no criminal. We had cast him in a role that he did not deserve, both because in the absense of answers of what happened to Jane we needed it filled and, because with his edginess [ed. I’m transcribing an audiobook idk if this is what the word is, it doesn’t seem right imo], charisma, and flair, he could play it so well.
Is it ever justifiable, I wondered, to trap someone in a story that robs them of their truth but voices someone else’s?
Regardless of what you’re reading, it is hard to know going in – if we can flip around Foe’s failures into a greater point – whether a greater point is going to be made.
On a lighter note to wrap up this week, I’m still reading through Cormac McCarthy’s last book, The Passenger, and have discovered the absolute delight that is Cormac McCarthy writing in his iconic nihilistically deadpan way about cats:
He knelt and crawled up under the bed talking to the cat until he could reach it. Come on, Billy Ray. Nothing’s forever.
It wasn’t the sort of news that a cat likes to hear.
And
The cat was investigating the room. He wasnt too happy about any of it.
And also
He went upstairs and fed the cat and stretched out on the bed with the cat on his stomach. You are the best cat, he said. I dont think I ever knew a finer cat.
rip to a legend
Standard plugs zone:
I’m also a copy editor for The NYC Thorn, the NYC-DSA’s weekly roundup newsletter of local political news. If you live in NYC, essential reading imo
I’m also Book Reviews Editor for Kissing Dynamite. Hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a small press or independent book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a msall press or independent poetry book you want to write