Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Book Report: A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball


A Cure for Suicide is more than a bit too twee for my taste. In its defense, it's structured unusually, with lots of white space on each page, so even though it's a thick-ish book, I felt like I was a really fast reader as I tore through it. It's set in the near future where people who want to commit suicide are given the option to take an injection and basically get their brain wiped. Then, they re-learn how to do everything, basically, under the care of a personal-life-coach-or-equivalent while living in a huge house in a rural community. First off, the Republic (as the one world government is called in this book) doesn't seem to be concerned about keeping health care costs in line at all. And it was never made clear to me what the advantage was of basically giving people brain damage instead of just letting them kill themselves. It's not a clear upgrade, imho. There are some elements of 1984 as the protagonist betrays a fellow treatment-getter, but then it turns out at the end that maybe he didn't after all?

Anyway, there was a particular type of book or short story that I really enjoyed when I was in college: a boy is sad and struggling, and he meets a girl who's obviously too good and together for him, but she sees something in him that no one else can see (probably not even him!), and they, against all odds, become a couple (finally, someone gets him!), and then something tragic happens before their pairing is revealed to be actually not-the-best. A tinge of sadness is always present, which just makes it that much more poignant. I was too young for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope to have a name, but that was definitely my thing. The example I remember best is "Testimony of Pilot" by Barry Hannah. We also would have accepted the doomed romance in All the King's Men. I can't say that I'm embarrassed to have enjoyed those stories, but they definitely doesn't touch me in the way that it did when I was young and (even more) awkward, and was really looking for a relationship that would make a good story more than, you know, a good relationship. There's also some misogyny lurking in all that over-sensitivity, I'm afraid. I was a sexually frustrated and very pretentious young man. Anyway, A Cure for Suicide has one of these types of stories as its final act, which leads in to why the protagonist wanted to end it all at the beginning of the book. That story is the best part of the book, but that's damning with faint praise, I'm afraid.

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