Lost Everything

Here's yet another book about the collapse of society following some sort of calamity, but instead of nuclear war it's the rising tides caused by global warming. I read Lost Everything, by Brian Francis Slattery, because it won some award, but I didn't find it award-worthy. It's a dull, dreary book that I soldiered through, much like the characters as they fight for survival.

Set in the Susquehanna River valley, the book focuses on disparate characters. The rising of the oceans seems to have dissolved life as they knew it. "The ocean knocking on the door, about to let itself in. It took maybe seventy years. A growing beat, they say, of stronger and stronger storms, a long chain of hurricanes, until the walls gave way and the streets went under, buildings fell. Savannah. Atlantic City. A freak storm in Boston. A ragged swath carved out in New York. the remaining cities cringing with every change of season, every gathering of clouds, waiting for the Big One."

The Big One is an approaching storm from the west that is rumored will wipe out everything. But meanwhile there's a war going on--the military versus a resistance movement, but it escaped me what the causes of the conflict were.

The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator who relates most of this second-hand, which is an off-putting and frustrating approach. We get multiple viewpoints, the most prominent a man called Sunny Jim and his friend, a minister named Reverend Bauxite. They are headed up the Susquehanna to get to Jim's son in Binghamton, New York, where he is housed with his sister, Merry. Jim's wife was a rebel who died in a suicide bombing of a bridge. So we get a kind of Huckleberry Finn river story, as the two board a ship, the Carthage (that it is named for a fallen civilization is surely not a coincidence) that has a variety of other passengers.

We also get the viewpoint of some soldiers as they move across Pennsylvania, including one, Sergeant Foote, who has gone undercover on the Carthage, looking for Sunny Jim. She ends up in a relatioship with an unnamed con artist.

The writing is spare and grim, and full of incomplete sentences, which annoyed me. I didn't really care about any of the characters, and found much of the book unpleasant. There are some vivid descriptions of freak violence, such as this one: "He was driving a decades-old sedan on the back road from Lisle to the highway, found the animal standing in the middle of the road after midnight. He laid on the horn, jammed the brakes, and the deer turned toward him, charged the car. The first hoof put a tight, deep dent in the hood. The next went through the windshield, through the driver's skull. Then the deer was up and over the roof, down the other side, and Mr. Dave was leaning back in his seat, mouth open, eyes staring upward. Hands draped over the wheel. The car went another twenty yards, then listed left and rocked to a gentle stop on the side of the road."

That has some good writing in it, which Lost Everything could have used more of.