johnny dangerously. reviewed The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch
Review of 'The Gone World' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I will be thinking about this book for a long time. I will be thinking about Shannon Moss. I will wonder at the possibilities in her life, the branching roads mapped out, hypothetical and real. This is the best time travel book I've ever read, the best mystery (simply because it has so many, unfolding like a rose), the best book about spaceflight and the apocalypse and sacrifice. Is anything really the end? The world keeps changing, blossoming, blooming. Everything is beautiful and simultaneously terrible. Time is an uroboros.
While this is undeniably a genre novel, it's also very much an adult contemporary novel, and I think it bridges the gap wonderfully, of interest for both crowds. If you like detective stories, stories about serious women solving serious crimes, this one's for you. If you like twisty pulpy benders with inexplicable unreality, this one's also for you. I am so …
I will be thinking about this book for a long time. I will be thinking about Shannon Moss. I will wonder at the possibilities in her life, the branching roads mapped out, hypothetical and real. This is the best time travel book I've ever read, the best mystery (simply because it has so many, unfolding like a rose), the best book about spaceflight and the apocalypse and sacrifice. Is anything really the end? The world keeps changing, blossoming, blooming. Everything is beautiful and simultaneously terrible. Time is an uroboros.
While this is undeniably a genre novel, it's also very much an adult contemporary novel, and I think it bridges the gap wonderfully, of interest for both crowds. If you like detective stories, stories about serious women solving serious crimes, this one's for you. If you like twisty pulpy benders with inexplicable unreality, this one's also for you. I am so glad I read this book.
I'll be thinking about the ending through all the recursions of my life, the echoes and the branching paths. Other reviews of this book compare it to Twin Peaks and True Detective. The prose does have a Lynchian flair for the bizarre, and the murder mystery is as gruesome, sad and violent as the first season of True Detective. However, it reminds me far more of the X-Files (in terms of setting, characters and location), Arrival (in terms of atmosphere), and perhaps the first season of Westworld (thematically, with its questions of personhood, the ravages of time, and the themes of impossible futures).
Yet the ending reminds me of nothing so much as Inception's ending-- something meant to be discussed, curled eternally in ambiguity. Yet unlike Inception, the entire book sets you up not to doubt every truth, but to experience and enjoy the multiplicity of endless conflicting truths, each equal and legitimate. In an age of 'mindfuck' twists and 'ending EXPLAINED' youtube diatribes, I find this extremely comforting. This book is not meant to be analyzed or picked apart (though not for lack of depth; the world of this story is as well-built and detailed as any of its more pulpy fantasy or science fiction contemporaries, while still being effortlessly understandable to anyone even glancingly familiar with the last 20 years of American history). The entire book could perhaps be seen as an effort to condition readers to accept dubiety; there are no easy answers. The journey is more important than the destination; time is a beauty meant to be experienced.
It doesn't matter if you're real. Be at peace. Keep going. Someone else would quit.
