Thursday , March 28 2024
Scarlett Thomas ponders immorality, simulated universes, and the "storyless story" in her latest novel.

Book Review: Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

Is fiction involving metafiction itself metafictional?

Although perhaps not directly, that is one of the ideas readers might ponder in Our Tragic Universe, the latest novel from Scarlett Thomas. Thomas likes to write about big ideas. Her last novel, The End of Mr. Y, was predicated on a supposedly cursed 19th century book but explored concepts like consciousness, quantum physics, and parallel realities. She doesn’t deviate from that in Our Tragic Universe. In fact, the novel is built around portentous issues like immortality and whether we are all living in a simulated universe — and the storyless story.

That’s right, the storyless story. Essentially, according to the book, it’s a story whose entire point “is the subtle rejection of story within its own structure.” It is, says the main character, almost metafiction “but more delicate.” Thus, the question that opens this review, although I admit to being enough of an illiterati that it may be easier to wrap my mind around living in a simulated universe. Yet while big ideas percolate through Our Tragic Universe, it often seems the true focus of the book is personal relationships and the nature of storytelling. And, to some extent, it is its own storyless story.

The novel is built around Meg Carpenter, who is still trying to write the “groundbreaking, literary, serious debut novel” for which she received an advance 11 years ago. Carpenter, whose novel is down to 43 words at one point in the book, has spent the years writing and ghostwriting genre fiction and holding workshops and retreats to teach others how to write it. As she also writes book reviews for some income, she reads a book called The Science of Living Forever. It proposes we have passed “the Omega Point,” where science has created a “Second World” in which we live as we head toward immortality.

As Thomas notes both in the story and the acknowledgments, this is based on physicist Frank Tipler’s 1994 book The Physics of Immortality, where Tipler argued there would be a future omega point at which an infinite amount of information processing power would result in computer simulations of all intelligent life that has ever lived. Carpenter’s almost infatuation-like interest in the ideas of The Science of Living Forever and its follow-up is one of the frameworks upon which Thomas builds the story.

As the fact she is still working on her novel a decade later suggests, Carpenter’s life has not quite gone as she might have expected. Her relationship with her live-in, increasingly moody boyfriend is growing distant, at best. She thinks she’s falling for a much older, married man. While her boyfriends works full-time at a non-paying position, they live on the occasional payments she gets from her reviews or genre book sales. Her friends all seem to be confronting their own issues. All the while, Carpenter tells us how she is working on and thinking of her big novel — metafiction within the story itself — and how there was “always something there to delete.” As she ponders the concept of the Omega Point and the changes in her life, Our Tragic Universe suggests there is a commonality between how we view the universe and the storyless story.

As one of Carpenter’s friends says in a “manifesto” about the storyless story, it has no moral center, presents a paradox with no answers or solutions except false ones, and a “reader is not encouraged to ‘get into’ the storyless story but to stay outside.” Perhaps oversimplifying it, in layman’s terms, it is an almost Zen-like approach to the journey, not the destination or conclusion, that is important. Carpenter begins to think that modern life is similar, that people are becoming “little more than character arcs, with nothing in our lives apart from getting to act two, and then act three and then dying.” We are focused on the destination and what is immediately useful, rather than the journey and whatever direction it may take us. She believes moving inexorably to definitive resolution is what is wrong. She wants “a tragic universe, not a nice rounded-off universe with a moral at the end.”

Our Tragic Universe seems to reflect this process. It isn’t a book that provides answers or solutions, or much, if any, resolution. It might even suggest that if you’re finding answers in it, they’re not the right ones. Ultimately, then, if you want a book with a fixed or final meaning, Thomas isn’t giving you one. If, however, you want to accompany a character who seems to find as much value on meandering toward the destinations in her life than where she might ultimately end up, Our Tragic Universe might be your storyless story.

 

About Tim Gebhart

After 30 years of practicing law to provide shelter for his family, books and dogs. Tim Gebhart is now perfecting the art of doing little more than reading, writing and sleeping.

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