(Note from 2012: to be honest I didn't like this book that much but didn't have the confidence to just say so)
"The main idea of the novel is to depict the positively good man. There is nothing more difficult that this in the world, especially nowadays." Thus wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky on The Idiot, his own tale of a flawed yet Christ-like figure crushed by passion and capital. Dostoyevsky came to regard The Idiot as an artistic failure, and indeed feared the same as he wrote it, writing to his niece: "Of all the good figures in Christian literature, Don Quixote is the most complete. But he is good only because he is at the same time ridiculous... Sympathy is aroused for the good man who is ridiculed and who does not know his own worth, and this sympathy is aroused in the reader too."
Michael Byers' debut novel is about a positively good man, and as Dostoyevsky feared The Idiot would be, it is a wonderfully written, acutely penetrating failure. Henry Moss, the geneticist-physician who is the leading character of the novel, is not perhaps a Christ-like Prince Myshkin, but his native decency and kindness thrusts him into an ethical dilemma in which forces of money, of professional ethics, and of compassion and love for his patients all combine.
Moss' work is focused on Hickman Syndrome, a fictional syndrome that closely resembles Progeria, a disease marked by much accelerated ageing. Children with Progeria suffer the physical ravages of a lifetime in a decade and a half. Byers has changed Progeria in creating Hickman - for example, Hickman patients suffer cognitive decline, not seen in Progeria. However the inspiration is clearly Progeria.
Byers creates Moss' occupational and emotional world deftly. Set during in dot com boom Seattle, the Mosses are set outside from the vast fortunes being made all around. Moss' Austrian wife Ilse, a physician herself now frustrated in a medical administration role, feels particularly keenly the fact that in boom times fortunes are made not only by the clever and resourceful but also - but especially - by the stupid and sheeplike. Their adolescent children Sandra and Darren stand on the cusp of adulthood, and Moss' son Darren mirrors Moss' favourite Hickman patient, William.
There's a slightly rote feeling to Byers handling of the characters; now the focus on Moss, now on Ilse, now on Sandra, now on Darren. Byers captures the professional warmth and compassion of Moss well, as well as the less pretty self-righteousness of medics (particularly in the character of Ilse) and there's an Updikean lushness to the invocation of middle-class suburbia. Some may find the elegiac tone a little wearing at times; however there is plenty of fondly-observed humour, particularly in the adolescent characters.
Giles Benhamouda, a three-year old with subtle but clear signs of Hickman, is referred to Moss, and not unexpectedly routine genetic analysis shows he has the mutation for Hickman (in the novel Byers has imagined the discovery of a "Hickman gene" in 1985, and in a case of life neatly mirroring art (or art-in-progress), in April 2003 the Progeria Research Foundation Genetics Consortium discovered that the disease is caused by a spontaneous mutation to the Lamin A gene.) What is unexpected is the discovery that Giles' entirely healthy teenage brother also carries the mutation. He carries a further nucleoside sequence which seems to undo the effects of the Hickman mutation. Moss is stunned to discover a potential cure for Hickman.
The ethical problems this raises power the rest of the novel. Most obviously, there's the chance to make big money on this, and Moss is in due course contacted by various pharmaceutical type. They talk the language of money perhaps, but its testament to Byers' skill that they are made into caricatures or cardboard cut-outs of greed - they too are decent people trying to make a living, excited by the possibility of great financial gain perhaps but that is not necessarily evil or ignoble.
The more painful dilemma Moss faces is whether to use the treatment he develops to treat William, who is heading inexorably towards death, or to wait for the wheels of the FDA and other bureaucracies to grind exceedingly slow. Moss would risk sacrificing not only his professional licence but also the integrity of the treatment itself to treat William. The action unfolds gradually - Byers is certainly a slow paced author - and with the maturing of Sandra and Darren, Ilse's unhappiness with her administrative role acting as a sort of counterpoint to the main plot. Life goes on, inexorably, and ageing is as real for those not affected by Hickman as those who are.
Borges wrote that at the end of Ulysses we know the most intimate details of Leopold Bloom's life, down to the amount of stools in the toilet bowl, yet he is somehow unknowable still. The accumulation of detail is not necessarily the key to living, memorable characters. The telling detail, the revealing phrase, in a few words tell and reveal more than the hyperrealist approach to character. I can't help feeling that a book focused more narrowly on Moss, and the ethical dilemma that faces him would, to put it bluntly, work better.
One trivial but rather jarring note: the author's biography tells us that he "was born in 1969, the son of a research geneticist and a computer programmer." Perhaps this is an ironic reference to two of the disciplines that underlie the book, and Byers has spoken about how his father worked with patients with accelerated ageing (not to the same degree as Progeria) Nevertheless, it strikes an odd note in an otherwise brief author's bio - is the suggestion that, by a kind of Lamarckian inherited adaptation, it is a "qualification" of some sort to write the book?
Link: http://www.nthposition.com/longforthisworld.php
