Thomas Gough
In the Absence of Heroes, by Anthony McCarten, (Vintage, 2012), 389 pp., $28.99.
A sequel to Death of a Superhero, Anthony McCarten’s new novel In the Absence of Heroes relocates the Delpes from New Zealand to Watford, North London to tell the story of a family playing out their grief in a techno-saturated reality. The novel begins with a list of statistics about contemporary internet usage which, depending on your own online savvy, will strike you as either alarming or taken-for-granted: 50% of the people online lie about their age, weight, job, marital status and gender; 20% of the people going online will experience negative impacts on their life; use of the internet is a contributing factor in nearly 50% of all relationships and family problems; 11% of people going online are becoming compulsive or addicted; women are now online more than men.
In the Absence of Heroes begins roughly where The Death of Superhero left off. In the time since the death of the younger son, Donny, the Delpe family has all but imploded. Nineteen-year-old Jeff Delpe fails out of school and loses himself in Life of Lore, an online game invented by McCarten, while his mother, Renata, turns to an internet confession service to plumb the abyss of her anguish. Jim Delpe, the father and husband, processes the passing of his son by repressing: sealed in a world of professional preoccupation and personal isolation, he escapes to the family’s £750 bucolic cottage with the company of his dog each weekend.
The narrative begins to get complicated when Jeff, tired of serving as the glue that holds his family together, leaves home without so much as an explanatory txt. Renata haunts Jeff’s school, stalks his friends, posts a reward for his return on Facebook, and spray paints ‘Jeff Delpe. Call Me. ♥ Mum’ on the side of an abandoned building. The interior landscape of her grief slowly becomes more resonant than the shell of the life encasing it. To the anonymous online confessor that she has taken to calling God, she admits, ‘I inhabit two worlds, I think. And I don’t know which one is more real’.
Jeff has also found comfort in the escape to an alternative reality. Having overheard Jeff tell a friend the name of his avatar on the Life of Lore game, Jim acquires the guidance of the IT geek at his law firm to enter the online reality where he knows his son is hiding. In episodes of description and dialogue that call to mind a screenplay, Jim engages in role-playing scenarios that hone his gaming skills alongside his moral prowess. In between his full-action adventures of Life of Lore, he manages to conduct incognito conversations with his son that begin to reveal Jeff to him in a new light.
In an interview on National Radio, McCarten explained that the novel’s Life of Lore game ‘is about moral workouts’. The description struck me as apt, in that In the Absence of Heroes is a moral workout overall. The issue to be worked out concerns the moral and social effects of what Jim calls ‘the whole post-modern hurly burly’: internet dating, blogs, gaming, Facebook, and Twitter. The issue, as an issue, is prominent in the novel, and at several places Jim reiterates the dilemma in the bluntest of terms, as for example in the following interior monologue: ‘Parents, who do not understand this new plugged-in world, stand at the edge of the biggest generation gulf the world has ever seen’.
Despite the fact that it would be a stretch for any thinking person to ignore the increasing centrality of technology in our day-to-day lives, In the Absence of Heroes goes to painful lengths to keep our attention tightly focused on the subject. This hyper-concentration on the issue results in a novel that feels over-determined, hemmed in by its insistence on defining itself around a problem rather than a theme. The sense of over-determination also underpins the language of the novel, which is at its weakest when it indulges in computer-related similes and analogies, such as Jim imagining the act of replicating his genes in his two children as ‘Copy. <control-C>’.
More importantly, however, the doggedness of McCarten’s concern with the question of technology’s role in our lives limits the opportunities for emotional development in the plot. The tight focus on technology, for instance, means that much of the narrative’s time is spent in reductive online dialogues instead of given over to face-to-face confrontations that might have allowed for more development. This is, of course, the point: computers can damage our imaginations. They are capable of narrowing what it means to be human. I agree. Point well taken — but does exactly reproducing the problem in your explication of it strain against the purpose of the undertaking?
Having lodged my grievance against the novel’s bullypulpting about technology, I do have to admit that the Life of Lore scenes are successful in recreating the urgency of online games, which strikes me as no mean feat. Readers who also happen to be gamers are sure to get a little rush out of the novel’s ‘realistic’ depictions of cyber-reality. Entering into the scenarios on each level of Life of Lore, I felt as if I were being immersed in the starkly digital experience of another world. And there’s no denying that the scene of cyber-sex is handled deftly. Nicely-textured and charged with their relevance to the plot, the episodes between AGI, Jim’s online avatar, and Kayla, his cyber-mistress, are fraught and sexy. They feel like something new.
In the Absence of Heroes is most compelling in those moments when it relents and takes a breather from driving home its message. The scenes at Blackstable Cottage, which treat us to thoughtful and often surprising interior monologues of Jim, offer reprieves from the exploration of technology’s influence in our lives. In the countryside, away from the suffocating influence of London and the slightly one-dimensional presence of Renata, the prose yields a bit. Minor but welcome turns of thought surface in which Jim begins to come alive as an unpredictable presence. Pulling into the cottage one Friday evening, for instance, Jim looks at the house that is the decisive symbol of the career he has spent his life constructing, and he sees something he has not before: ‘Jim barely recognises this house he now owns. What had been its appeal?’ In this question, we see a glimpse of a gorgeous little awakening. Jim, free of the constraints of the plotline, happens upon what seems almost like an independent thought. In moments such as this one and the brief scene at the trout pool, Jim Delpe becomes a character capable of what the writer Grace Paley has called ‘the open destiny of life’.
In the end, fiction is the mental and emotional experience of character. There can be no doubt that ideas are important to us as readers, but in fiction moral workouts are secondary pleasures rather than driving forces. While I never lost interest in the question of the centre of In The Absence of Heroes, I did on occasion wish I could put the issue of technology aside so that I could get down to what was most human in the novel: the troubled emotional sea that the Delpes happen to be navigating with the assistance of pixels and megabytes. There is something in the novel’s relentless obsession with the digital divide that comes across as a tic rather than a trope, and by the last chapters of the book I found myself praying for a power outage.
In the Absence of Heroes is most compelling in those moments when it relents and takes a breather from driving home its message. The scenes at Blackstable Cottage, which treat us to thoughtful and often surprising interior monologues of Jim, offer reprieves from the exploration of technology’s influence in our lives. In the countryside, away from the suffocating influence of London and the slightly one-dimensional presence of Renata, the prose yields a bit. Minor but welcome turns of thought surface in which Jim begins to come alive as an unpredictable presence. Pulling into the cottage one Friday evening, for instance, Jim looks at the house that is the decisive symbol of the career he has spent his life constructing, and he sees something he has not before: ‘Jim barely recognises this house he now owns. What had been its appeal?’ In this question, we see a glimpse of a gorgeous little awakening. Jim, free of the constraints of the plotline, happens upon what seems almost like an independent thought. In moments such as this one and the brief scene at the trout pool, Jim Delpe becomes a character capable of what the writer Grace Paley has called ‘the open destiny of life’.
In the end, fiction is the mental and emotional experience of character. There can be no doubt that ideas are important to us as readers, but in fiction moral workouts are secondary pleasures rather than driving forces. While I never lost interest in the question of the centre of In The Absence of Heroes, I did on occasion wish I could put the issue of technology aside so that I could get down to what was most human in the novel: the troubled emotional sea that the Delpes happen to be navigating with the assistance of pixels and megabytes. There is something in the novel’s relentless obsession with the digital divide that comes across as a tic rather than a trope, and by the last chapters of the book I found myself praying for a power outage.
THOMAS GOUGH is the pen name of Thom Conroy, who lectures in Creative Writing and English Literature at Massey University in Palmerston North. His fiction has been published widely in New Zealand and the United States and recognised in Best American Short Stories 2011.
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