Pantheon
Review by George Yatchisin
The best speculative fiction gives us the distance to see our own world more clearly. Take Scott Guild’s debut novel Plastic. Most of its characters are just that, figurines, although others are waffles, or robots, or hairy shipping boxes with whirring propellers as means of locomotion. But their post-nuclear-war world is a nightmare of rampant consumerism, life lived virtually, and the ever-present anxiety over random terror attacks from groups trying to wake up the drugged-to-complacency citizenry to its own environmental destruction, in the book called the Heat Leap. It doesn’t take much for our humanity to be stirred by these unusual characters’ plights.
Did I mention when the characters converse, they do so in a quick cut new language? At one point history is described by a person explaining why not to study it: “War war war. Kill kill kill.” And here’s how a match from phone app Hot Date attempts to comfort our heroine Erin early in the book: “It okay feel bad, he says. No need embarrass. I get—I get total. Life just…creaky, no? So tough sometime.”
Tough isn’t a strong enough word for what Erin goes through. That Guild’s downbeat plot machinations don’t wear the reader out is a testament to how much his protagonist—a real doll—ends up miserably, hopefully human. Plastic provides many clever ways to help us feel Erin’s struggle, narrative tricks that are well earned and that I don’t want to give away in a review. Just be prepared for anything and everything to happen, and then to be read in a very different light a few more chapters in, from scenes from what at first seems to be just a goofy TV show, Nuclear Family, to actual musical numbers—that mention of Sondheim early on will go off like Chekhov’s pistol in a later act of the novel. Indeed, Guild had a career as a musician in the band New Collisions (who toured with Blondie and the B-52s) prior to his move to writing, and you can even download a parallel album of Plastic, a collaboration with the artist Cindertalk, if you care.
As catchy as those songs are in their throwback, 1980s synthpop way—imagine Spandau Ballet and their ilk weren’t New Romantics but New Pessimists, say—the novel is something richer and stranger. Its allusions are varied and deep—a scene of a traffic jam leaving motorists stopped beneath an endless parade of advertisements is part Blade Runner, part Good Place, and then Guild nails the problem with the line “dozens of mascots posed with their products like gods who work on commission.”
And then there’s Erin’s first love, Patrick, with whom she only makes eye contact moments before he is killed in a terror attack. It’s a creepy revision of Bernstein in Citizen Kane mooning over the woman in the white dress on the ferry he glimpsed one day and never forgot. Better than never forgetting, Erin gets to bring Patrick back to “life” in the dominant virtual program Smartworld via a program called EZ Pal, with its slogan Never Say Goodbye. That “relationship” gets as twisted as you might imagine—more so, actually—but it’s really all just back story, part of the search for meaning in a world seemingly devoid of any.
Family? How about a sister who turns terrorist and a father who dies too young of a wasting away sickness called BPD—Brad Pitt Disease. Church? There is a mega-one, of course, delivering prayer via app, too; as the figurines reason, “religion, far from some dead superstition, was an ancient form of ‘technology’ for pursuing a happy life.”
That doesn’t mean life in Guild’s novel can’t be grand. Fueled by more drugs than Huxley dosed out in Brave New World, it’s easy for Erin and her family and friends to imagine they star in a private sitcom or musical. In this way Plastic is very David Lynchian, too, all those off-kilter musical numbers proffering a life in dreams that never quite come to the citizens of Lumberton or Twin Peaks. We all hope to act, don’t we? That’s why a line like, “with a gasp of relief, the laugh track roars,” cuts so many ways.
Ultimately Plastic is a book about morals, about loyalties, about love and country. Can violence be a step to a much greater good? Which comes first, family or nation? Is a void the greatest sense of peace or the definitive blank of obliteration?
The inventive wit of Guild’s speculative fiction makes all that Big Thought go down pretty easily. It might even be the author’s own confession when he has one character admit, “Or I could choose to have faith. Faith that I was put here for a reason. That it was, I don’t know, my job somehow. My job to love this world of dying things.”
