“They would not have come for me, naively I drew their attention to me.”
I really need to stop reading dystopian futures in the current climate. Never mind, here we go again.
Adriane Strohl hsa been chosen as the valedictorian at her high school in the North American States. Unfortunately for her, she decides this is an opportunity to ask a few questions about the world she’s grown up in; a world of strict laws, conformity and constant surveillance. Her punishment is to be sent to Zone Nine, otherwise known as Wisconsin, 1959.
Now eighty years in the past and with no way of communicating with her family who haven’t even been born yet, she must accept that the next four years are going to be very lonely, as she can’t reveal to anyone who she is or where she’s from. But then she meets her psychology professor, Ira Wolfman, and finds in him a kind of soulmate. At first she just suspects that he’s another person exiled from his home time, but as they grow closer, it seems that both of them are willing to risk everything for one shot at happiness.
Unfortunately, fresh on the heels of The Waiter, this is another book is an unsatisfactory ending. It feels that Oates didn’t know where to go, had written herself into a corner, and left it all hanging rather than explaining anything or giving us any kind of closure. I guess the aim of the story is that we are to make up our own minds about what happened, and sometimes that’s great, but here it just felt really lazy. Towards the end (and these are spoilers), we see evidence that things are as Adriane has been told, but also understand that it may only have been a partial truth. The ambiguity is clearly supposed to be part of it, but I found it weak given the story opened in a world where things are rigid and there’s no ambiguity allowed.
Otherwise, there are some interesting aspects to the story. There’s a lot of exposition in the early chapters as Oates builds up the world of NAS – a version of the US that came into being after 9/11 and has since absorbed Canada and Mexico into its borders – and it’s an unpleasant one, with more than a touch of Orwell about it. Her take on 1959 is interesting too, with students concerned about a nuclear war they think is due any minute – but we and Adriane know never happened – and a general sense of unease as you get the feeling they’re being watched but in a time of “primitive” technology, you can’t quite work out how.
An interesting tale, but somewhat disjointed.
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