Strange Bodies

Starred review from October 21, 2013
Literary science fiction has portrayed walking dead, living dead, undead, and to this mix Theroux now adds strange bodies (mankurt), in a strange, satisfying novel about possession featuring a literary scholar, a music mogul, assorted East European thugs, and the long dead but still articulate Dr. Samuel Johnson. A gloomy English academic with an unappreciated gift for forensic nuance, Nicholas Slopen is in serious need of money when entrepreneur/collector Hunter Gould asks him to authenticate papers purported to be Dr. Johnson’s handiwork. Close examination convinces Nicholas the papers are indeed Johnson’s, but also that they are fakes (the papers’ old-fashioned script on more modern material suggests foul play). Sure enough, Nicholas is drawn into a network of enslaved human bodies inhabited by the souls of dead people. Following the death of the human currently inhabited by Johnson, Nicholas undergoes a crypto-scientific procedure reminiscent of something from an old horror movie, after which he finds his body inhabited by someone else, while his soul is trapped inside an ex-convict’s sturdy, tattooed physique. Attempting to explain himself to his ex-wife lands Nicholas in the modern incarnation of Bedlam. Theroux recounts this contemporary gothic tale in Nicholas’s own words, those of the women Nicholas reaches out to, doctors’ notes, and e-mails, demonstrating mastery of diverse styles, including Johnson’s. Observations about science, medicine, psychology, love, madness, and literature result in a thought-provoking and engaging fusion of comedy and horror, irony and insight. Agent: Elizabeth Sheinkman, WME Entertainment.

Starred review from December 15, 2013
A labyrinthine exploration of identity and mortality, filled with big ideas that transcend the occasionally clunky plotting. As one of the more literary-minded of science-fiction novelists (or vice versa), Theroux (Far North, 2009, etc.) challenges summary in a novel that encompasses literary criticism (the protagonist is a Samuel Johnson scholar, or perhaps he was); a conspiracy between a record company mogul and Russian scientists that involves shifting an individual's consciousness into a new body (or "carcass"); and a couple of possible love stories that may include romance between the living and the dead. Dr. Nicholas Slopen--the literary scholar and Johnson expert--has already been declared dead once, and perhaps twice, by the time the novel presents itself as the testimony found by a former lover on a flash memory stick. The document begins in a mental ward, where the patient is trying to convince his therapists that he is in fact Slopen, whose death has been well-documented. He then relates the tale of how he (Slopen) had been hired to document some newly discovered Johnson letters that he immediately dismissed as fake, before realizing that he was in the midst of something far more extraordinary and sinister. The letters were written by an initially nonverbal savant who was convinced that he was in fact Johnson and who eventually convinces the scholar that something stranger is afoot than fraud or even madness. "I felt I understood less and less, even as, intuitively, I was drawing closer to the hidden chamber of the infinitely dark truth." And within that infinitely dark truth, distinctions between sanity and madness, life and death are not nearly as absolute as they might have initially appeared: "All madness has a touch of death to it....But the finer details of reality--the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person's true nature--have something delicate and consensual about them....Each time someone drops out of our collective reality, it weakens a little." Often enthralling and occasionally maddening, the novel expands the reader's sense of possibility even as it strains credulity.

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September 1, 2013

Literary fiction, thriller, or sf? National Book Award finalist Theroux smoothly blends them all--I mean, how many books get likened to works by Borges and Philip K. Dick?--in a story about a psychiatric patient who claims to be the notorious Dr. Nicholas Slopen. Slopen eventually leads doubting authorities to a conspiracy between a Silicon Valley power maniac and his Russian allies.

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