From the Bookshelf of Apocalypse Whenever…

Parasites Like Us

Adam Johnson

Why we're reading this: Hailed as "remarkable" by the New Yorker, Emporium earned Adam Johnson comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and T…more
[close] Hailed as "remarkable" by the New Yorker, Emporium earned Adam Johnson comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and T. C. Boyle. Now, in Parasites Like Us, he takes us on an enthralling journey through memory, time, and the cost of mankind's quest for his own past.

Anthropologist Hank Hannah has just illegally exhumed an ancient American burial site and winds up in jail. But the law will soon be the least of his worries. For, buried beside the bones, a timeless menace awaits that will set the modern world back twelve thousand years and send Hannah on a quest to save that which is dearest to him. A brilliantly evocative and haunting cautionary adventure, Parasites Like Us will earn Johnson an immense audience of devoted fans.

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Aug 08, 2007 Christy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction-and-fantasy

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The book jacket for Parasites Like Us states, "Times are changing in South Dakota. Birds are disappearing. Dogs are turning on mankind. Hogs are no more." This is all true--by about chapter nine of twelve. (And these are long chapters.) More than half of the book is taken up with the protagonist's life as an academic, his relationship with his students, his relationship with his father (and his dead stepmother and the mother who abandoned him as a child), and his infatuation with a new woman, Yu The book jacket for Parasites Like Us states, "Times are changing in South Dakota. Birds are disappearing. Dogs are turning on mankind. Hogs are no more." This is all true--by about chapter nine of twelve. (And these are long chapters.) More than half of the book is taken up with the protagonist's life as an academic, his relationship with his students, his relationship with his father (and his dead stepmother and the mother who abandoned him as a child), and his infatuation with a new woman, Yulia, whom he meets at a party. For a novel about a guy dealing with his own issues of loss, desire, and acceptance, this works well. For a novel about the end of the world, not so much.

Nevertheless, there are some really interesting ideas here. One recurring idea is that of parasitism. Hank Hannah, the protagonist, is a paleoanthropologist who studies the Clovis people, the progenitors of Native Americans, those people who came over to America at the end of the last Ice Age and subsequently wiped out huge swaths of mammalian life of the time. Hannah argues that the Clovis were essentially parasites who took more than they needed and left the world less diverse and interesting for it. This concept is not limited in application to these ancient people, however:

"...these [rich people gambling at the casino] were the real Clovis: people who used for themselves the resources of many, who exploited their environment to depletion, and, once everything they wanted was gone, would skip town. . . . The Clovis took and took and took, leaving six hundred generations of descendents to fend for themselves in an impoverished world, a place without horses to ride, elephants to tame, or camels to burden." (89)

Similarly, he thinks, "But the Clovis simply plundered the first sunny days of humanity, just as we, a thousand years overdue for the next Ice Age, were plundering the last" (125). And: "If the history of humanity has been the extinguishing other forms of life, it's hard to say whether we have been evolving. The Clovis built an empire of meat, and their parting gift to the earth was to leave it thirty-five species lighter. And our last gasp was to eradicate hogs and birds" (304). Parasites like us, indeed.

Another idea that I found particularly compelling is Hannah's reflection on survival:

"The more you learned about life, the more it seemed an engine of little design, and to survive its queer lottery was what we called living. You could choose to celebrate this survival, as my father did, or you could mourn the misfortunes of others, which I figured was the least we could do. But the future would prove us both wrong--to live when others do not, we were to learn, isn't survival, but being left behind." (176-77)

This idea of survival as being left behind is one that comes out of Hank's particular situation (he is scarred by his mother's abandonment of him), but it is one that carries some weight for me, too.

And on the subject of the afterlife, Hank asks his father, after the rest of humanity (aside from the two of them and about 10 others that they've found thus far) has been destroyed, if he believes in an afterlife. His father's answer is this: "Well, if afterlife means to keep living on after life is over, don't you think that's us? Aren't we doing that?" But Hank wonders, "Couldn't we have made our lives matter more during our before-life?" (332). This is a question worth holding on to. What would we need to do to make our lives more meaningful during the before-life? What would we need to do to live by the credo illustrated by McCarthy's The Road, to live as if everything we do matters, even in the face of evidence to the contrary?

Finally, Hank, in his narration of this tale of the (near) end of humanity for later generations, includes his own personal philosophy:

"I have come to believe, after a life of research and personal observation, that there are two fallacies to being human, one great paradox, and three crimes. The first crime against existence is hope. After that great savager of life, the second crime is nostalgia, generally a lesser offense. Anthropology will teach you that there's no such thing as the good old days, but hope--hope drives death's getaway car." (37)

The rest of the elements are scattered throughout the book, waiting to be discovered. The third crime against existence seems to be giving false hope to a child. The two fallacies? Hank says, "the first is that people invariably believe they live in times of great change and significance. Eighteenth-century England believed it. The pharaohs believed it. Turn-of-the-millennium America believes it" (53). The second is "the notion of 'climax'" (144), the idea that we have a sense of great moments occurring as they occur, the idea that the high points in our lives are clear to us. This is simply not true, he says, citing multiple examples (with, of course, many more left unsaid) of false climax, moments when individuals declared this moment, whatever it may have been, to be the pinnacle of their achievements, only to go on and do bigger and better things. The one great paradox is "that for someone truly to reside within you, they must be wholly unavailable" (260). ...more

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May 06, 2008 Joshua rated it really liked it

I really enjoyed this book - I didn't see any of the plot twists that constantly hit throughout the book. Thoroughly believable characters and a great plot. ...more

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