How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
I fix time machines during the day (whatever a day means for me–I’m not sure I even know that anymore), and at night I sleep alone, in a quiet, nameless, dateless day that I found, tucked into a hidden cul-de-sac of space-time.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Charles Yu’s “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” uses the tropes of science fiction to explore questions of identity, memory, and loss. Though wrapped in the trappings of science fiction, with various time-travel paradoxes playing a part in the plot, the novel is really a story about an immigrant father and his son, and the mutual disappointments that inform their relationship.
And though I enjoyed the book very much, I found that its style kept me just on the verge of hurling it across the room. This novel suffers from a style that I’ve encountered in a few recent books, in which repetitive descriptions are stitched together with commas into long strings. It’s a sort of elegant variation on steroids. Used sparingly, this trope can enhance a passage: it can convey an uncertainty on the part of the narrator, who struggles to find just the right words, and provide just a touch of uncertainty when the pile of descriptors contradict each other. But used constantly, it feels cluttered and rough, and in desperate need of an editor. “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” would likely have lost a quarter of its weight had passages like these been trimmed down to size:
My father would forever be the guy who did not get the credit, the one swallowed up, enveloped by security, swept away and lost in time.
If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pass him one message, it would be this: he had something. Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in his garage. Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he’d find a way in. His idea was good enough, would have been good enough for the director, for the world, good enough to be a serious contribution to fictional science, good enough for me, but I don’t know where he is, and I have never been able to tell him this.
Pages and pages of these passages fill up the middle third of the book–unfortunate, because this is the most affecting part of the novel, in which the protagonist re-lives the moment his father succeeds, and fails, with his time travel invention. A recent article by Alexander McCall Smith demonstrates the power of concision against this sort of overwrought prose. While I don’t think every writer needs to sound like Hemingway or (Gordon Lish’s version of) Carver, I do value some editing.
Luckily, Yu’s book was compelling enough to overcome its style. (I never finished Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You because this stylistic tic was combined with cloying self-obsession.) I look forward to reading more of his work, perhaps in a more rigorously edited version.
