The Storytelling
Sometimes, imagery becomes just as much about the way it used as the images themselves. Very early in the book, descriptive prose is used to convey very simple information about a man standing outside a door. This is before information is given about the time period. Word use and tone is just as much imagery in this case as the content of the description:
“Outside the parlor doors he stood, passing his hands repeatedly over his hair—a nervous habit of his, much as the repeated smoothing of his forelock as he read or drew, or the light drawing of his forefinger beneath his nose as he thought or waited for his turn at the chessboard, or any number of other displays to which he was given—before sighing again and opening both doors at once in a gesture of confidence and conviction that he of course did not possess. They looked over at him as a group, but passively, neither pleased nor dismayed to see him.”
Ignorance is Superiority
The self-centered personality who views itself as superior to all others is charged with remarkable adaptability. It is confident even in the face of an onslaught of evidence offered in support of its own bottomless inferiority. Too bad that such people don’t only exist in fiction:
“At the time, this had felt like a privilege, a gift, but since then he had come to learn that when Charles declared his ignorance it was only because he thought the subject inconsequential. He could make his lack of knowledge—about flowers, baseball, football, modernist architecture, contemporary literature and art, South American food—sound like a boast; he didn’t know because there was no reason to know. You might know, but then you had wasted your time—he had other, more important things to learn about and remember.”
The Farm
The third section of the book takes place in a dystopic America of the future. It is, weirdly, a dystopian vision that includes elements both sides of the political spectrum seriously fear today. For instance, a government agency called the Farm is a right-wing anti-science monster come to life. Or, at least the paranoid fears connected to nightmares taking place there connect back to the age of Covid in which the novel was published:
“You heard rumors about the Farm: that they were breeding new kinds of animals there—cows with two sets of udders, to produce double the amount of milk; brainless, legless chickens that could be packed, fat and square, into cages and would be fed by tubes; sheep that had been engineered to eat only waste, so that you wouldn’t have to use land and resources to grow grass. But none of these rumors had ever been confirmed, and if there were in fact new animals being made, we never saw them.”
Symptoms of a Future Epidemic
The dystopic future for the country is one in which viral epidemics are pretty much the normal course of events. The fascists win out in the end in part because they essentially have the viruses on their side. Or, at the very least, they can more fully exploit even the slightest failure to contain viral spread. Especially when the symptoms start becoming more grotesque:
“Inside, two boys were sitting at a child-size table, assembling a puzzle. I knew they were seven, but they looked four. I had read the research about juvenile survivors, and these children were in some ways instantly recognizable to me: They both wore tinted glasses, even in this low light, to protect their eyes, and they were both very pale, their limbs soft and thin, their rib cages blocky and wide, their cheeks and hands pitted with scars.”
