Parenthood shining heart of rough draft

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This article was published 15/10/2011 (5485 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Postmortal

By Drew Magary

Penguin, 369 pages, $17.50

 

THIS Twilight Zone-like novel, by a hotshot American blogger turned author, fashions a throwback sci-fi riff with a single manoeuvre.

In 2019, we find a society with an illegal, simple medical procedure that halts aging.

The trick is that this can bestow immortality but it cannot, alas, ensure it. Only aging is permanently forestalled. Cancer, car crashes, violent death — these are all still very much in play.

As the story opens, John Farrell, an unfulfilled 29-year-old divorce lawyer in what appears to be New York City, is pondering the decision to pay the seven grand for that procedure.

He inevitably does it and his life is heaved up just as the world around him crumbles under the unprophesied consequences of a fragile, competitive immortality.

Traditional institutions become radically destabilized. Who, for example, wants to get married if the “life-term” of the marriage contract suddenly means something rather new?

Who can find a life to live contentedly at a precise biological age for perhaps thousands of years? Wouldn’t those with “the cure” eventually want an antidote for it?

John dodges marriage, finds loves, loses loves and a dad, fathers a child, becomes a kind of euthanasia proponent, and generally meanders through all these obstacles, tripping more often than gliding.

As one would guess, The Postmortal only half-heartedly cloaks a piercing, grumpy and sustained social commentary on early 21st century America.

Author Drew Magary got here in what has become now a kind of usual manner. He wrote a vulgar and funny blog about his life as a new dad, F.K.S. — Father Knows S .

This garnered him a devoted following, which led to several other online opportunities and then magazine journalism before his first book in 2008, Men With Balls, a clever but flighty take-down of contemptible professional athletes.

The Postmortal is not a sports book. It is about the meaning of living, of growing up, of parenting, of aging and of dying. This is suddenly the major leagues.

Magary opts to navigate that transition by wisely clinging to selected habits. For much of this book, his “chapters” are just his familiar blog-style entries.

But these grow and expand as the book finds its legs. By the heart of the book, he is writing in real, full, thoughtful chapters.

Of his former style and subjects, he drops the nervous vulgarity and skips the sports. But he cleaves to that idea of parenthood that he once wrote so charmingly about.

This becomes the shining heart of an otherwise rough draft of a decent first novel.

 

Laurence Broadhurst, a father of three, teaches in the faculty of arts at the University of Winnipeg.