The afterlives A novel

Review by New York Times Review

IN EVERY MOMENT WE ARE STILL ALIVE, by Tom Malmquist. (Melville House, $25.99.) Based on a true story, this searing autobiographical novel, translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch, depicts a father struggling to cope with the tragic loss of his partner just as their daughter is born. EATING ETERNITY: Food, Art and Literature in France, by John Baxter. (Museyon, paper, $19.95.) A wide-ranging, lavishly illustrated guide to French gastronomy that broadens its subject into the fields of art and literature and the culture at large. Who ever suspected that Proust's famous madeleine almost lost out to a plain slice of toast? THE AFTERLIVES, by Thomas Pierce. (Riverhead, $27.) In Pierce's warm and inventive debut novel, about a heart attack victim who finds the world subtly changed, the feeling that nothing's quite real - that perhaps everything is a fever dream in the narrator's dying brain - nags at him, and at us. NINE CONTINENTS: A Memoir In and Out of China, by Xiaoli Guo. (Grove, $26.) Guo, a writer and filmmaker, grew up in China at a time of deprivation. The Beijing Film Academy introduced her to a more cosmopolitan world; now in London, she has been acclaimed one of Britain's best young novelists. THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World, byCharlesC. Mann. (Knopf, $28.95.) The essential debate of environmentalism - to respect limits, or transcend them? - as seen through the lives of two men, William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. THE SABOTEUR: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, by Paul Kix. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Dashing and brave, Robert de La Rochefoucauld was a member of the French Resistance who came from an aristocratic family. Kix details his exploits and many death-defying escapes during the war. MUNICH, by Robert Harris. (Knopf, $27.95.) An expertly paced thriller featuring two junior diplomats, once friends at Oxford but now members of the opposing German and British delegations that would seal the fate of Czechoslovakia by permitting the Nazis to occupy it in 1938. RESERVOIR 13, by Jon McGregor. (Catapult, paper, $16.95.) McGregor's fourth novel opens with the disappearance of a teenage girl visiting an English village, but its deeper concern is the passage of time and its effect on local residents. MARTIN RISING: Requiem for a King, by Andrea David Pinkney. Illustrated by Brian Pinkney. (Scholastic, $19.99, ages 9 to 12.) A soaring, poetic account of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the last month of his life. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 29, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

Small-town commercial-loan officer Jim Byrd's death was brief and something of a disappointment. Jim did not see a light at the end of a tunnel or glimpse the pearly gates. Jim's depressing near-death experience imbues him with a curiosity about the hereafter. When a local restaurateur claims that her establishment has a mysterious presence, Jim researches the property's history and discovers that its early residents died in a fire. Jim soon rekindles a romance with his high-school sweetheart, Annie, whose first husband drowned. Together, Jim and Annie locate the scientist who has built a device that allows one to communicate with the dead. In his first novel, Pierce (Hall of Small Mammals, 2015) deftly and humorously illustrates the myriad ways that technology robs us of our humanity. The concept of hologram grammers walking among us while promoting products is but one clever example. Pierce's measured, straightforward style does not overtly highlight the speculative-fiction elements, adding to their impact. Wildly imaginative and thought-provoking fun for fans of Dave Eggers and Gary Shteyngart.--Kelly, Bill Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pierce's first novel (after the story collection The Hall of Small Mammals) is a free-spirited lark that questions how people live with the presence of death. After suffering cardiac arrest and a five-minute clinical death, 33-year-old commercial loan officer Jim Byrd is outfitted with an experimental defibrillator called a HeartNet. Soon after, Jim begins to notice strange things in the world around him: holograms of dead celebrities like Prince and Robin Williams begin to walk the earth, a strange Christian sect called the Church of Search comes to town, and Jim becomes obsessed with a staircase that may be a portal to the afterlife, through which a voice enigmatically chants, "The dog is on fire." His companion in these investigations is a young widow named Annie Creel, and, after the two impulsively marry, they find questions of life and death intruding on love. More subplots accrue, including the league of unscrupulous elders known as the White Hairs, the legacy of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, and rumors of a hacker targeting the HeartNet technology. Pierce's breezy style only partially saves the overlong novel from a lack of urgency affecting almost all of its numerous story lines. When it gels, the novel manages a rare and significant clarity about the effects of death on the living (particularly couples, aware that all romance is ultimately temporary), but otherwise it seems unsure which story it wants to tell. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In his first story collection, Hall of Small Animals, Pierce penned a phenomenological meditation on the ephemeral and recurrent experiences that form the core of human experience. Here, in his debut novel, he reflects on life after death through the prism of quantum physics. A paranormal event on a staircase in town leads Jim Byrd on a journey to uncover the history of the home's residents and the probability of supernatural phenomena. In this quest, he dabbles in New Age religion, falls in love, loses his father, and stumbles upon the ideas of discredited physicist Sally Zinker, who claims to have built a machine that can access the afterlife. Jim, along with his wife, Annie, eventually tracks down both Sally and the mythic Reunion Machine. Not sure who or what to trust, they both must ultimately weigh the possibility of a multiverse against the risk of vanquishing their accumulated experiences and memories in this one. VERDICT Pierce has a gift for probing the limits of the psychic realm to uncover the benevolence that manifests from metaphysical insight. Truly remarkable. [See Prepub Alert, 7/17/17.]-Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An author of award-winning short stories (Hall of Small Mammals, 2015) considers life, death, and what comes after in his debut novel.Jim Byrd is dead at the age of 33. And then, a few minutes later, he's alive again. This experience has some disturbing repercussions. The first is a surgical implant that reminds his heart to keep beatingwhich comes with a phone app to let him know every time his heart forgets. The second is that Jim has to go on living with the knowledge that his death wasn't accompanied by a bright light or an angel chorus. With a constant reminder of his own mortality in his pocket and evidence that the great beyond is an eternity of nothingness, Jim goes on a quest for hope and meaning that involves a paranormal investigator, experimental physics, and church services led by holograms. While this novel is set in the not-too-distant future, none of the issues that it addresses are new. Living with the knowledge of death is a universal predicament. Science fiction has been investigating the ways in which new technologies challenge our humanity since Frankenstein, and horror novels from Dracula to Jennifer Egan's The Keep have made use of the eerie qualities of phenomena like long-distance communication. Thomas Edison sincerely believed he could invent a "spirit phone," an idea that gets a 21st-century spin here. What Pierce does with all these tropes is make them boring. One of the experts Jim consults insists that nothing in the universe exists more than 93 percent of the time. This would be a more chilling observation if Jim, himself, was ever fully real. Nothing about himhis job, his friendships, his marriageseems worthy of sustained attention. The narrative is all just a lot of plodding exposition as Jim fumbles along. He has almost no inner life, which is especially unfortunate since he is not just the protagonist, but also the narrator. There's a second, related tale woven into Jim's story. It is, at some moments, slightly more compelling than the main text, but it mostly just makes a slow novel slower.Timeless questions. Tedious answers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Exit heartbeat. Exit breath. Exit every mood, every memory. Exit you. To where? First, their voices-the nurse's, the doctor's, my parents'. "He looks so puffy," I could hear my mother saying. "Is it normal he looks so puffy?" I was a rabbit pulled from the black hole of a magician's top hat. The doctor pointed to the television on the opposite wall and asked me if I knew what it was for. I thought he was joking. Next he asked me for my full name. This question frightened me more than it probably should have. I was Jim Byrd, wasn't I? Didn't he know I was Jim Byrd? My chest was incredibly sore and bruised. Days would pass before I'd recall my collapse in the parking garage down the street from my office. A gash in my forehead had already been sutured. One of the nurses, a young girl with henna tattoos all over her hands and wrists, explained that the gentleman who'd discovered me at the base of the stairs leading up to P2 had administered CPR until the paramedics arrived with their defibrillators. "If not for him," she said, "you'd probably still be dead." "Dead?" The nurse blushed. To have mentioned the fact of my death, I gathered, had been a slipup. She backtracked: Not an actual death, more like a figurative one, or, rather, a technical one. An almost-death. Sudden cardiac arrest was the diagnosis. I had a long history of passing out, though until now I'd always understood these episodes to be a symptom of a simple fainting disorder. Childhood doctors had advised me to eat more to keep up my blood pressure. But new tests revealed my true condition, which amounted to a vast electrical problem in my body. A misfire, my cardiologist called it. "But was I really dead?" "Clinically." Dying, he clarified, was a process, not a single event. It was like a wave pulling back from the shore, the sand shifting color, dark to light, as the water leached out of it. Even where the sand appeared dry, sometimes you could dig down a few inches and find more water. You died, and then you died a little more, and then just a little bit more until you were all the way completely dead--or not, depending. "For how long was I?" I asked. "Well, that's difficult to say. Given that you seem to have suffered no brain damage, I'm guessing not more than five minutes. You're very lucky." "I saw nothing," I said. "I'm sorry?" "While I was dead. I saw nothing. No lights, no tunnels, no angels. I was just gone. I don't remember anything." The doctor arched his eyebrows but was silent. "What does that indicate to you?" I asked. "I wouldn't read too much into it." "Read too much into it?" "I wouldn't give it too much thought, is what I mean. Look on the bright side. You're back. You're only thirty-three. Still a young man. You have more life ahead of you, Mr. Byrd." To help guarantee this, he recommended that I have a device installed in my chest that would regulate this electrical problem, and soon thereafter I became one of the earliest recipients of a HeartNet, a very advanced implantable defibrillator that looks a little bit like a small onion bag only with tighter mesh. The bag wraps tightly around the heart, squeezing it, fusing with it. Located at its top is a little shrunken head-a node, its brain. I'm told it's practically an artificial intelligence, that's how smart this technology is. If never powered down, HeartNet will keep my heart beating for as long as its battery allows. About two hundred years, apparently. Due to the longevity of its batteries, the device has actually created confusion in some cases. I understand that there've been instances where HeartNet has failed to recognize that a body has already given up on itself and so continued pumping blood, undeterred. Hospitals have been forced to store bodies in their morgues with still-beating hearts. My HeartNet is in constant communication with its manufacturer in Sheldrick, California, and I have the ability to monitor the diagnostics it provides in real time on my phone. A few taps on the screen, and an image of my own heart appears there, pumping and quaking. Blood flow through the four chambers is mapped as a staticky blue and red, outtake and intake. Beats per minute, electrocardiographic charts, echocardiographs, blood pool scans. It's all there at my fingertips. If you select a certain option, the device will even alert you every time it saves your life--which is to say, every time your heart fails to beat properly of its own accord. I experienced this for the first time about two weeks after the procedure. I wasn't running or lifting weights or having sex. I wasn't involved in any sort of strenuous activity whatsoever. I was simply sitting on the couch watching television. Receiving the alert--three delicate chimes, like a call to meditation in a Buddhist temple--I immediately shut off the TV and dressed. I was wasting my life! I desperately needed to be out of the house--but where to go? I wasn't sure. This was a Friday night, about nine o'clock, and I had nowhere to be. I walked up and down the road a few times, then came back home and read three pages of a book on the later Roman emperors before sitting down on the couch for more television. For weeks after that I worried that I wasn't making the time count. I'd been given a second chance, and I needed to take advantage. One morning I got in my car and just started driving. West, naturally. Maybe I'd go all the way to the Pacific, I wasn't sure. I didn't have a plan. Crossing the North Carolina border and entering Tennessee, I felt alive, but by the time I reached Kentucky, the monotony of the drive had settled in, and I'd lost interest. I spent one night in a nice hotel in Louisville, toured the famous bat factory there, drank some whiskey, and then drove back east. Not long after that I bought a plane ticket and flew to Ireland. I drank beers alone in a pub in Cork and listened to some decent music. Then I flew to Munich to see an old friend who'd settled there after graduate school, and one night I went home with one of his coworkers, a German girl who spoke very little English. Seeing my scar, she ran her fingers along it gently, a look of concern and pity on her face, and insisted, via hand signals and broken English, that she be on top lest I overexert myself. I tried to explain that the problem wasn't the plumbing but the electrical, but this only further confused matters. She showed me her toilet and held up her fingers: One or two? A few days later I returned home--to Shula, North Carolina. ¥ The White Hairs, we called them, the old geezers who'd flooded into Shula over the last twenty years and seized control of our local government and civic groups and boards. You sometimes got the feeling there'd been a convention--a gathering of all the nation's old people--and together they'd voted Shula as their new home. You couldn't really fault them for it. Shula was beautiful after all, quaint but busy, the Blue Ridge Mountains visible in most directions. The White Hairs, really, had become the backbone of our town's economy. Businesses thrived downtown--the antique stores and folk-art galleries and sandwich shops. Most restaurants were successful as long as they offered early seating. Large gated communities had sprung up to accommodate them--clusters of condominiums and townhouses with shared shuffleboard courts and swimming pools. To address their many medical needs and conditions, we'd added a second hospital, not to mention the various rehab centers and private practices. I'd had a front-row seat to many of these changes in my capacity as a commercial loan officer. My uncle, a soft-looking man with a hint of a British accent acquired after only two years of graduate school in London, was an executive with a national bank, and it was with his assistance that I'd finagled my way after college into a leadership development program designed to train promising new employees for careers in credit analysis and commercial lending. I'd been grateful for his help but also surprised by it. My uncle and my father had never been particularly close. I can recall only two childhood visits to my uncle's home in Connecticut, a mansion with a horizon pool and a wine cellar. "All hat, no cattle" was how my father used to describe his brother, and I will admit that my uncle did put a premium on appearances. If he was bound soon for a vacation on a fancy coast, for instance, you better believe he'd find a way to worm that tidbit into the conversation. Still, when he'd offered me his help, I'd accepted it gratefully. What did I care if he was only intervening as a way of lording his good fortune and connections over my father? A leg up was a leg up. After completing the program I'd taken a job at a branch in my hometown. Shula was not a particularly old city, though we celebrated its heritage and culture regularly with parades and photographic displays at the public library. A lake at the edge of town--now not much more than a neighborhood runoff pond at the center of a weedy meadow--had once been a popular tourist destination. There'd been dances in the pavilion there--parties, vacations. There'd been a small amusement park with roller coasters and merry-go-rounds in the adjacent field. People had been happy there once. You saw these people in photographs in their full-body bathing suits, their swim caps. Women with coiffured dogs in their laps; men with slick hair on water skis. Their bright, untroubled faces, their voices rising up like so many clanging, noiseless bells--what had their lives been like? They were gone now, all of them, disappeared into the blue haze that surrounded the town. Some mornings the fog was so thick and impenetrable you'd forget the rest of the world was out there. Other cities, other countries, other lives. The mountains--blue, soft, ethereal--were more like suggestions of geological features than actual ones. Always they lingered in the distance. You could never seem to reach them. They had no edge, no sure boundary or beginning. Science confirmed their ancientness. The landscape was wild but intensely familiar. We were living in the ruins of mega-continents, on rolling hills ground down by millions of years of erosion. Crust. Thrusting sheets. Bedrock. I found it somewhat comforting to think of my limited time here on the ground in the context of that larger, deeper history. Excerpted from The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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