Science vs. Fiction

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
by Charles Yu
2010, Pantheon


I normally begin my blog entries by explaining what attracted me to a book in the first place. In the case of Charles Yu's first novel, the explanation is very simple: a review in the New York Times Book Review mentioned longtime childhood hero Douglas Adams in its first paragraph and the cover design, by Adam Simpson, is super fucking cool.

How to Live Safely... is a postmodern oddity of a book. It is at turns frustrating in its bells and whistles stylistic braggadocio and touching in its circuitous, uneasy depiction of the father-son relationship. I found myself simultaneously torn in my delight at its brain-scrambling conceptual shenanigans and my annoyance at its obliqueness, its refusal to deal with emotion firsthand.

The premise of the book is that Charles Yu (main character/author) repairs time machines for a living. He recounts the history of modern time travel (which apparently occurred sometime in the early 1990s, coinciding with the advent of CGI?) in which his father had a large hand. Essentially, time travel operates on a purely fictional basis.

By "fictional", I mean that in this novel, time travel is only possible within a purely diegetic space - i.e., narrative. Transitioning from one time to another entails the use of "chronogrammar" - i.e., verb tenses.

From here, the wordplay gets only more complicated. For example, during his journey Yu wistfully misses his wife, The Woman He Never Married. The Woman He Never Married is, he explains, a "perfectly valid ontological concept" as since he has never married, or even met her, she cannot be said to not exist.

Yu plays the concept of time travel for familiar laughs, as in his description of this Marty and Lorraine McFly-esque conundrum:

I see a lot of men end up as their own uncles. Super-easy to avoid, totally dumb move. See it all the time. No need to go into details, but it obviously involves a time machine and you know what with you know who.

The time travel gimmick only works for so long. Yu utilizes some Adams-like touches, like a company manager called Microsoft Middle Manager who is software that encourages you to get to work and tries to get you to go out for beers with it, or the surprisingly paranoid android (the link does not lead to the Radiohead song, but this one does) derivative TAMMY, his operating system on board his time machine, who is highly neurotic and clearly in love with Yu.

About a third of the way through the book, Yu drops of his time machine for repair and when he picks it back up again, bumps into himself exiting the machine, panics, and shoots himself. Trapped now in a time loop paradox, Yu must learn as much about himself as possible before exiting the time machine and getting shot.

Most of this quest for self-knowledge entails reflection on his relationship with his father. Yu uses the "time machine" to reflect extensively on his childhood. These portions of the novel are depicted gingerly and with great sadness, as though too much investigation might shatter these memories.

We wandered from room to room, just missing one another, on paths neither chosen by us nor random, but determined by our own particular characteristics, our own properties, unable to deviate, to break from our orbital loops, unable to do something as simple as walking into the next room where our beloved, our father, our mother, our child, our wife, our husband, was sitting, silent, waiting but not realizing it, waiting for someone to say something, anything, wanting to do it, yearning to do it, physically unable to bring ourselves to change our velocities.

In the above passage, you can get some sense of the thematic play here between this hyper-conceptual word play and a more moving, underlying emotion. The transition here from somewhat arch, bird's eye behavioral description to fully invested, intimate speculation on his parents' inner lives is subtle, in large part because of the truly lovely cadence of the writing.

The observation here is clearly removed, describing their lives as set orbital trajectories whose paths never cross, but he emotionally identifies with his parents, or at least projects his emotions, his need for connection and seemingly inability to establish it, onto them. His yearning becomes their collective yearning. The knowledge of the potential for fallacy here dictates the removed (but passionate - all those commas, as if he doesn't want to let go of a thought) tone of the passage.

Yu's fixation on the past focuses specifically on his father, who one gathers is an absence from his present life; in the novel, Yu's father is stuck in time travel and hasn't been seen in a decade. One can only assume that Yu's relationship with his father is strained, and it remains possible that he abandoned his family a long time ago. This does not stop Yu from speculating about his father's emotions, and what is surprising is Yu's generosity in this portrait of what sounds like a cold man:

I noticed, on most nights, his jaw clenched at dinner, the way he closed his eyes slowly when my mother asked him about work, watched him stifle his own ambition, seeming to physically shrink with each professional defeat, watched him choke it down, with each year finding new and deep places to hite it all within himself, observed his absorption of tiny, daily frustrations that, over time (that one true damage-causing substance), accumulated into a reservoir of subterranean failure, like oil shale, like a volatile substance trapped in rock, a vast quantity of potential energy locked in to an inert substrate, unmoving and silent at the present moment but in actuality building pressure and growing more combustive with each passing year.

Yu is obviously a talented writer. The rhythm of his prose is honed. Despite the long sentences (which, to me, in its nearly smug favoring of aesthetics over formal grammar reveals some training in a graduate writing program), the cadence of Yu's words push the reader on with a light touch. Yu seems unwilling to create prolonged rests in his work, creating a breathless quality that verges on a feeling of inevitability, of fatalism.

The array of scientific vocabulary in that above excerpt (subterranean, potential energy, inertia) brings to light one of the primary dichotomies of the novel - science versus fiction. In the novel, Yu's father is a scientist run ragged on his obsessive pursuit of scientific innovation - the development of the time machine. This obsession leads to his eventual demise and prevents him from truly connecting with his son, who aspires to be worthy of his father's attention, but whose relative lack of talent in the sciences prevents this.

Yu portrays science as being kindred spirits with creativity - the father's toiling is the kind of superheroic, myopic commitment one envisions afflicting D.H. Lawrence or Mozart. His father's disinterest in acknowledging the validity of this view is a major part of the driving emotional force of the book.

Listen, for example, to Yu reflecting on his father's equation-making:

The words were right in there, close to the curve, close to the y-axis, just floating in the plane along with the graph, this space the Platonic realm, where curves and equations and axes and ideas coexisted, ontological equals, a democracy of conceptual inhabitants, no one class privileged over any other, no mixing or subdividing of abstractions and concrete objects, no mixing whatsoever. The words an actual part of it, the whole space inside the borders, the whole space useful and usable and possible, the whole, unbroken space a place where anything could be written, anything could be thought, or solved, or puzzled over, anything could be connected, plotted, analyzed, fixed, converted, where anything could be equalized, divided, isolated, understood.

This, of course, is a fallacy. Yu's father's science is the means to the end of their relationship, not the conveyance through which resolution can be reached.

As such, the focus on science in this book becomes bittersweet. Yu, as established, is talented in aesthetic sentence construction. One can't help but wonder if the novel would be stronger without the occasionally silly "chronodiegetic" science fictional conceit. The writing is strong enough to sustain a razzle-dazzle-free straightforward memoir, the emotional tenor of the piece elegiac enough to please serious fiction fans but accessible enough to appeal to a lower common denominator (file under "immigrants, tenuous parent-child relationships of").

But I suppose that in the end, goofily adopting the tongue-in-cheek brand of science fiction on display here is the only means by which Yu can resolve the science versus fiction dichotomy. What better way to justify the father versus son (science vs. fiction, sobriety vs. humorousness, discovery vs. creation) conflict than to unite them. This is possibly the only means Yu has for delivering some kind of catharsis, personal or fictional, by novel's end.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a novel with a wounded heart. Yu's relationship with his father is clearly as unresolved in real life as it is at the novel's end. The only means for resolution available here is to project Yu's sense of loss about his relationship with his father onto the character of the father, to imbue him with the same sense of loss, of hurt, that Yu experiences.

In the end, it is not the blank grid paper on which anything can be "analyzed, fixed, understood" but the world of fiction. However, the distinction between science and fiction is as false a distinction as of that between father and son. They are the same thing, their emotions shared, inextricable. Son becomes father, father is son.

But then again, this synchronicity of father and son, of loss and understanding, is itself a fiction as desirable, intoxicating, implausible as time travel itself.