Monthly Archives: June 2018

Love’s Labors Lost

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They Both Die at the End
by Adam Silvera.
2017.


“Maybe it’s better to have gotten it right and been happy for one day instead of living a lifetime of wrongs.”

If a book keeps me up past my bedtime, gets me teary, and even after I finish it I still can’t sleep because I need several hours to process how I feel about what I just read, that’s an automatic “highly recommended.” Thanks, Adam. (I think.)

They Both Die at the End is a young adult science fiction novel is set in a world just like ours, with one huge difference. In this world, there exists a service called Death-Cast. Every midnight, Death-Cast phones every person who is going to die on the coming day, to give them a heads-up. To give them one last chance to live to the fullest. To say goodbye. To have a fling. To do whatever they need to do on their Last Day.

Mateo Torrez is eighteen. He is bright and talented and kind. He is also agoraphobic and hardly ever leaves his apartment in New York City. He’s about to begin college (an online university, of course). On September 5, 2017 (the release date of the book!) Mateo gets the call. It’s a shock. How could a healthy young man who is too timid even to leave home possibly die so young?

Rufus Emeterio is seventeen and also a New Yorker. He gets the call in the middle of beating up his ex’s new boyfriend. Rufus is angry and hard edged. But cut him some slack. He lost his parents and his sister in a car accident just four months ago. Now he lives in a foster home and wonders what kind of future awaits him. None at all, it seems.

Mateo and Rufus don’t know each other. Neither of these young men has anyone to spend his Last Day with. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. It’s called Last Friend, and before dawn breaks, Rufus and Mateo are Last Friends. They spend a magical day in New York together, doing their damnedest to live to the utmost. They make their goodbyes. They try new things. They party. They fall in love. Rufus teaches Mateo to be brave. Mateo helps Rufus rediscover his gentle spirit.

Spoiler: They both die at the end.

They Both Die at the End is a tour de force. A novel in which Death is so near it is practically one of the characters will instantly trigger deep feelings, but this is a two-edged sword. Once you’ve got your readers by the feels, you’d better use the opportunity to show us something worth the pain of the journey, or else your book will feel like cheap manipulation. I am happy to say that Adam Silvera not only passed the test, he aced the extra-credit section.

Silvera’s “Death-Cast” is more than just a gimmick to get the plot moving. He devotes some of his novel to examining the impact Death-Cast has on society, on hospitals and emergency services, on celebrity culture, on the internet. Even “Deckers,” as they are called—I couldn’t suss out why—have to put up with creepy people on the internet. Silvera also devotes some chapters to introducing a cast of minor characters. Some are Deckers wrestling with their own fates, some are not, some are already known to Mateo or Rufus, others are not, but all of them cross paths with our two young protagonists on their fateful day.

For this story belongs to Mateo and Rufus. It isn’t easy spending your Last Day with another Decker. You can’t help wondering whether you have inadvertently sealed your own doom. Maybe the piano destined to land on his head is going to get you too, since you chose to tag along. Hilariously, tragically, the two young men avoid taking elevators. “Two Deckers riding an elevator on their Last Day is either a death wish or the start to a bad joke,” says Rufus.

Over the course of their remarkable day and this amazing book, Mateo and Rufus overcome their initial discomfort, get to know one another, say their goodbyes, have adventures, and narrowly escape several incidents that might have been The End for one or both of them right there. They also open up to one another and heal each other’s hurts until at last their budding friendship blossoms into an honest-to-God love. And Silvera strikes not a single false note along the way.

But as the day passes—noon, 5:00 PM, 7:00 PM—the time allotted to them grows short. The tension mounts as they know, and we know, that it must happen before midnight, yet they and we hope beyond any hope that somehow, some way, they will escape their shared fate. One of the most touching moments in a book chock full of touching moments is when the two young men each try to make the other promise not to die first, because neither wants to be the one left behind, even for a moment. It is a promise neither has the power to make of course, and logically they can’t both make it, but the heart has a logic of its own. At last, death comes for them, deaths that were perfectly predictable, in hindsight.

We would do well, every one of us, to follow the example of Mateo and Rufus. It is not given to most of us to know the day of our own deaths. But we all know that Death will come. We cannot escape it any more than Rufus or Mateo could. Most of us will never live a day as full as theirs, but we can at least strive to live as many of the days that remain to us as fully as we are able.

Because we all die at the end.

In Defense of Escapism

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A couple of days ago, Chuck Wendig posted a piece on his blog about being a writer and coping with all the terrible things going on around us. I posted a comment over there, but I want to repeat it here. (Especially since Chuck’s website appears to have eaten my comment. It’s not displaying.) It was this part of his piece that I was reacting to:

Fourth: Words Are A Door

Just the same: embrace the power of escapism.

We all need to escape, man. Every day I’m looking for a portal out of this donkey show and into something more fun, something so distant that I can’t hear the chaos through the walls. Nothing wrong with writing that escape, or seeking it. Use your own stories to provide an out for yourself and your readers; and read books, too, that give you that escape. No shame. Words can be self-care. They can be a doorway out, for a time. A portal to a Narnia where it’s not a circus orgy of sick chimps running around, on fire, throwing flaming shit at one another.

Nothing wrong with that escape. Absolutely. I am currently writing a young adult science fiction novel set 150 years in our future. The world my protagonist inhabits is not perfect by any means, but it is a much happier and safer world than this one. Visiting his world gives me peace.

The recently departed Ursula LeGuin wrote:

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

And J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

I wholeheartedly endorse escapism. It can be the only thing that keeps the prisoner sane, and who could object to that? Besides the jailer or the tormentor, of course. So read stories. Especially read science fiction and fantasy. Write them too, if you can.

I am currently reading They Both Die at the End, and find I am liking it quite a lot. I will post a review here when I finish it, but if you’re looking for something to start with, you could do worse. Don’t be put off by the grim title (even though it is accurate).