Beautiful words, wonderful imagery, no plot. ( )

A slow boat ride through the apocalypse...
I heard the author at a reading shortly after finishing the book, and he's much too apologetic about his book being negative and depressing. Embrace it! Everything is going to hell! Yes!
That said, it's actually not as depressing as it might be. Yes, the United States is in a state of socio-economic collapse, wracked by a civil war fueled by desperation and despair. There's a lot of misery, denial, malaise, and yes, a great deal of loss.
But, judged by the standards of the post-apocalyptic genre, there's also a reasonable amount of hope... and music.

Yes, this book shares some elements and themes that 'The Road' (unoriginally) contained, but I like Slattery's writing style a lot better. Even when the plot (such as it was), was moving particularly slowly I enjoyed the lyricism, and the mood. But the book bears a great deal more similarity to 'Heart of Darkness,' (there are many obviously-intentional parallels) and possibly to J.G. Ballard's novels (his own homage to Heart of Darkness, 'The Day of Creation,' and his apocalyptic work as well...

( )

Well, I suppose I asked for it. When I see the word "literary" appended to science-fiction I know I'm unlikely to get a conventional story. I'm not going to spend the effort to try and explain this novel because I really didn't care for it. Dislike isn't the proper word - didn't care about the characters or what was going on was what I felt. It sounded interesting and there are a couple good reviews here on Librarything that attempt to explain this and what it is like. They do a pretty good job. I was intrigued enough to give it a try just based on the blurbs and a casual look-see - a near-future story set in the Susquehanna River Valley. This is one of those books where there is some lovely, beautiful imagery all over the place. I just couldn't enjoy it. Instead I would think things like, oh that is clever or vivid or whatever but who cares about all this? Is there a story or anything approaching a real plot here? A small part of me is reminded of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" - in that it is very stylish but who wants to read something THIS bleak? There are echoes of other things too ... a little Mark Twain, a little Faulkner with his "The Old Man, Violence and Terror in a Mississippi Flood."

After finishing I did go back and read over some parts. Doing so reminded me of the things that bugged me while I read it. It isn't just one thing. To discuss the things that bugged me would be spoilery and I don't want to spoil. I will say that the frequent lapses in conventional grammar threw me off. The odd narrator threw me off as part of the storytelling. When I repeatedly wonder who is saying something, is it the narrator, a character, are they even saying something? Maybe they are thinking this? Maybe they are thinking the other person is thinking this? Maybe they are just whatever ... I won't belabor the point further. The storytelling is unconventional. ( )

Bursting with vivid lively imagery. Beautifully devoid of clever plotting. As honest as fiction gets. A story about people by an amazing writer. ( )

What will happen to America as the effects of global warming continue to wreak havoc? Brian Francis Slattery imagines a much different country in Lost Everything, which has been nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award for 2012 for the best paperback original novel. Slattery imagines that the country we know as the United States is gone, replaced by smaller, regional countries that are engaged in civil war. The Susquehanna River Valley is in the middle of such a war, about which we are told little save that it is ravaging the land and the people. Sunny Jim has lost his wife Aline to the war -- not as a victim, but as a saboteur who died by her own bomb. Down the Susquehanna paddle Sunny Jim and the Reverend Bauxite, for Sunny Jim refuses to fight. They are trying to reach Sunny Jim's sister and his son. They must do so quickly, before the Big One hits -- a storm so severe that it leaves nothing in its wake at all:

"Just a boiling wall of clouds, gray and green and sparked with red lightning, and underneath it, a curtain of flying black rain, rippling with wild wind from one end of the earth to the other... I watched it take a town in the valley, far away below, and it was as though a wave were rolling across the ground, lifting houses, roads, trees, and all -- anything that was still there -- up into the air, into the mouth of the storm."

Along the banks of the river are communities that have suffered from both flooding and the war. Sandbags are piled to keep the river back, but over them the boaters can see smoke from gasoline fires and hear grieving families wailing over their dead. Some days the river banks instead offer markets, capitalism rising from the ashes. But soldiers swarm over the markets, and Jim and the Reverend are wary of getting on the highway instead of sticking to the river. When they hear about the Carthage, a ferryboat headed up the river, though, they decide to take the risk of going overland long enough to catch the boat.

The Carthage is a traveling menagerie: horses, camels, cows, birds, monkeys all over the deck. It's full of people, too, with a band playing belowdecks, squeezing out room among the heavy furniture, the fabric, all the belongings of those who have taken to the river. The captain agrees to take Sunny Jim because she knew his wife, long before she met Sunny Jim.
And so this peculiar book hits its stride, telling of the adventures of those on the boat as it heads upriver. The parallels to Mark Twain's masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, are unmistakable: both books depict people escaping unbearable conditions (slavery for Twain's Jim, drafting into the army for Slattery's Sunny Jim) and using a river for their travel. But there are also differences: Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite travel north, not south; they ride against the current instead of with it; and they are passengers on a riverboat with the company of others, not a raft by themselves. Despite the violence both behind and before the travelers, the book is oddly quiet and elegiacal, a mourning for the loss of a better world and an inability to see any future. Indeed, the only future possible seems to be one of the world starting over once the Big One has scrubbed the face of the earth clean.

It's easy to see why the Philip K. Dick Award judges' panel chose Lost Everything. The book has a lot of strangeness to it, even in the manner in which it is told (there is a first person narrator who appears every now and then to address the readers directly for a few paragraphs, without us ever finding out much about this individual or how he or she fits into the story). And it is beautifully written, with vivid descriptions of people, places, weather, and horrific violence. But while I appreciate this book, I do not like it. The characters are not very likeable or particularly interesting. Despite the war, the river, the weather, little happens, and nothing is resolved. Perhaps Slattery was seeking to write a meditation on T.S. Eliot's famous concluding line to "The Hollow Men," in which the world ends "not with a bang, but a whimper." In the end, what I'm left with is an appreciation of Slattery's talent, and a hope that his next book will be more to my liking.

Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/lost-everything-2/. ( )