Theater State by Jack Boettcher (A Review by P. Jonas Bekker)

Blue Square Press

198 pgs/$12

In Theater State, Jack Boettcher’s debut novel, published by Blue Square Press, the world has become what we wanted it to be. And yet, it isn’t exactly what we thought it would be. Although Boettcher doesn’t mention an exact year, it is clear that the novel is set in the future. A future where technology has made pretty much anything possible, the most recent development being a highway that grows and moves to adapt to the daydreams of those driving it.

Sometimes, this Megahighway swerves dangerously close to the classrooms of ‘The Academy’, an institute for highly gifted children ran by the elusive (and often holographically simulated) Principal Stone.

Janus, the narcoleptic protagonist of the story, has a special place in the ambitious plans of the Principal, who communicates with him – much to Janus’ annoyance – telepathically. Janus’ research project concerns the creation of an immortal jellyfish and holds the promise of immortality for man in the long run. This soon earns Janus a privileged status and the luxurious office that goes with it. Principal Stone, concerning himself with the breeding of a new generation of hyper-intelligent students (and not above fathering some himself) also picks him a wife.

The girl in question appears to be one of Janus’ classmates, but is in fact a hired actress ‘inserted’ among the students for unclear reasons. Things become even more confusing when this Katydid is chosen to be the ‘regional correlate’ of a pop star called Magnetic. ‘Like the mall Santa’, as Boettcher puts it, she performs in the place of Magnetic because Magnetic can’t be everywhere at once. Although, of course, it is unclear whether Magnetic is actually a person at all.

Much of the lack of tension I feel in Theater-State comes from Janus’ ambivalence towards everything around him. Things strike Janus as strange often enough. Mercenaries guarding the school, actors being hired to play students and the principal suggesting he marry one of them, South American generals hanging around the researchers’ offices. But then he sort of adapts and goes about his business.

This ambivalence, this not-taking of a moral stance, this absorbing everything with a semi-autistic indifference, coping with even the weirdest of circumstances by accepting them as inevitable, this not-rebelling against Stone or anything makes Janus a weak character and, as a consequence, severely weakens Theater-State as a whole.

Janus is not feeling crushed by some inhumane system like Winston Smith in 1984. Janus, and the other characters too, most of the time, sort of float through the universe of weirdness Boettcher created for them with relative ease.

It gets worse when Janus is forced to marry Katydid, while he is in fact in love with someone else. Here, Boettcher uses Janus’ narcolepsy:

‘He’d sleepwalked down the aisle and sleepvowed, too, Minister Stone presiding and just certified online for this one special private ceremony. ‘

That, to me, is just too easy. And it kills the suspense of the story.

On the other hand, a future where nothing much disconcerts us anymore is easy to imagine. And, to a point, you could say that this is Boettcher’s moral message: if we continue to focus on technology (and we will, most probably) and create a world where everything seems possible;  where we can’t tell whether the person we are talking to is an actual person, an actor or a hologram; where death is something that can be disputed or even eliminated, we are bound to go about shrugging our shoulders at things that, objectively speaking, should be quite shocking to us. After all, we can’t be sure if they are even real.

But the problem for the novel is quite real. Because if everything is possible, nothing is a surprise. And if none of the characters are actively fighting the system, they should be donned some other kind of conflict to justify their presence in the book.

Boettcher – much to my enjoyment, I must say – just keeps piling on the weirdness, creating a world both fascinating and deeply worrying. But at a certain point in a story, the stage-setting should be done and the conflict of the main character should kick into gear and pull the reader into the story.

In Theater-State, this point never really comes, so the book left me in a strange limbo. While it’s story and characters largely failed to grip me, the world it is set in had me fascinated.

*

~P. Jonas Bekker is a writer and a poet from the Netherlands.~