James Meek’s Absolutely not-at-all-meek The Heart Broke In

            James Meek’s The Heart Broke In is a fantastic, fantastic book—I read it on the heels of reading two unfun novels back-to-back[1], and Heart read lots like last year’s excellent Three Stages of Amazement by Carol Edgarian: massive of heart and empathy, tight of plot (with, maybe, one twist too many), and, more than anything, smart, emotionally and intellectually smart, the sort of book one closes and feels as if one’s been ultimately respected instead of condescended or pandered to.

Meaning what, specifically? Meaning The Heart Broke In is attempting to address fairly large topics in adults ways here, and is doing so with what I’d call the bare minimum of melodrama and bullshit: the difficulties of siblings and the families we come from, the frustrations of maintaining and not suffocating within the families we create, to say nothing of fame (see: fleeting, authenticity vs. cheap), medicine (see: values of various lives + diseases [meaning: a cure for cancer'd be sexy as hell, but far more folks die of malaria][plus also: how much bad is anyone willing to put up with for a cure to something else? What's the balance between cure and disease?]), and various valences of shame. That’s all abstract hooey. Here’s what’s up: Richie Shepherd’s the host of a teeny-bopper TV show (this is all set in Britain, by the by), a former rock star, and a married father of two. He’s also, at book’s start, involved (that way) with an underage beauty who was on his TV show. He is never, not once, an easy character to love, and maybe the book’s only weak spot might be that Richie’s never given much chance to do much other than be loathed. No matter.

Then, there’s Bec, his sister, who high-tailed in the opposite direction from her brother: books, medicine, science. She’s researching a cure for malaria, and has found a cure that’s got a hell of an asterisk: discovered as an antibody in certain populations, it doesn’t work 100% of the time, and it can cause bouts of blindness. So there’s that. Around this bro/sis pair is a constellation of other folks—an old pal of Richie’s who, after trying and failing to impregnate his wife, reconnects with and falls for Bec (and she him); there’s his uncle, the dying head of a cancer research institute; there’s his oafish brother. Most crucially, behind and underneath all these other folks, is culture itself (again, for real: Meek’s swinging big bats, and is gathering a whole hell of a lot in the nets he’s casting), specifically the culture of celebrity and too-much info. Through the character of Val, a publisher and Bec’s old boyfriend, the contents of the entire novel are, like an aerosol can, put under pressure: he blackmails Richie about the underage romance, gives him a year to find juicier dirt with which to save himself, and, for the rest of the novel (the confrontation between Richie and Val comes 70 pages in), we wait to see how this crucial aspect will resolve: will Richie save himself by selling out his sister, or will he allow his life and self to be smeared but, in so doing, spare making anyone else’s indiscretions public.

I don’t know how enthralling that set-up sounds. I don’t know what I was expecting when I started this thing, but I know that when I got to I think 200 pages the rest of the evening was foregone, and I finished this thing in a gulpy, breathless early-a.m. haze in the guest room, sparing my wife not only the light but whatever noises of assent, excitement, frustration or whatever I may’ve been producing. It’s that sort of a book: forgive the silliness but it’s a chewy book, one in which there are very cool, very real things going on, and not an once, not an inch of it feels fake or forced: the complications that drive the plot (and *drive* is too kindly geriatric a word: *rockets* might be better, though part of the perceived speed of this thing’s got to do with the fact that there are lots of very brief chapters–a page or two–which jack the hell out of the internal pageometer) are, one recognizes, put there by a single dude who’s writing the whole thing, but they feel 100% authentic, real: this book feels like a record of something that could very easily happen, and, through that naturalness, exposes weirdly large issues re: society and exposure (it takes no imagination to conceive of a book which uses big issues to drive a story, a book which would, I’d guess, feel false as Halloween’s worst gas-station mask).

I don’t know if it’s been a bleak year, fiction-wise. I’ve got a stack here I’ve been meaning to review, among them Powers’s Yellow Birds which, yes, is as good as everyone says, and Eggers’s Hologram for the King, which is also just as good as the hype (and, coincidentally, both of those are up for the National, and they’re both excellent, and either would be a great, great pick as winner), and I know there’ve been other good reads this year, but I’m hard pressed in trying to think of a more satisfying novel than this. It’s just fantastic–propulsive and confident, hopeful and messy, smart enough to be entertaining and entertaining enough to get away with being damn smart, The Heart Broke In is just fucking excellent, and you’re a fool to let the year close without giving it your time.

[1] Tempting as it is to flay those novels (Robin Sloan’s Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Scott Hutchins’s A Working Theory of Love), I can’t seem to work up the requisite critical apparatus to do so. I squirmed my way through 2000 words in consideration of them together, and it doesn’t…I don’t want to be pissed. Read the books if you want—Sloan’s is satisfying, loose and jaunty, a first-person thing set in SF and revolving around a mysterious book-reading club; Hutchins’s is a first-person plod of a first novel that’s bloodless and boring as the fourth rerun of a shitty sitcom; Sloan’s book, weirdly, does a far better job of addressing Actual, Real matters despite being fantastical; Hutchins’s novel’s stuffed with characters you’ll at best loathe, at worst want to throttle; both books feature a) first-person white-dude narrators in San Francisco involved in computers, and b) a shocking lack of actual self-awareness on the part of those narrators, moreso in Hutchins’s: his narrator’s a fucking navel-gazing pro but seems stupidly clueless about who he actually is (and, fine, maybe that’s an ‘authentic’ character or whatever, but how many fucking clueless white-dude narrators does one need to brush literarily up against before just chucking the fucking towel?). I’ll add in closing that both books trample mercilessly over the rules regarding subjective/objective first-person pronouns: both books are terrible in using “me” when “I” should be deployed. A small part of me believes this is significant, but I really just can’t work up the juice to grouch about it: Sloan’s book was fun enough, and had spirit galore, and Hutchins’s book just made me sad, made me wish he’d just written a better book to begin with, made me wish we expected more from books—there’s nothing scarier than considering the idea that we get the books we deserve.