Books I Didn't Finish: Recursion

One thing I struggle with, as a big-time media reviewer with an audience of billions, is how to respond to something whose only flaw is not delivering the story I expected. Is it really fair to call something bad just because it ended up going in a direction that I find uninteresting? How do you evaluate a well-written novel that succeeds on every level, save for subjective interest?

That’s actually completely irrelevant, because while Recursion’s plot direction did disappoint me, I also stopped reading it for multiple other reasons.

The premis, as presented in the opening chapters, is fascinating: people all over the world are suddenly remembering alternate lives, perceiving themselves to have suddenly woken up in a different world where their spouses are married to different people and their children don’t exist. Suicides among victims of this False Memory Syndrome are climbing, no one knows what’s causing it or if it’s contagious, the situation is generally not positive vibes. Our protagonist, Cop Guy, gets involved when he fails to prevent the suicide of a woman stricken with FSM, and before long he’s remembering another life where his daughter didn’t die in a tragic accident.

This is exactly the kind of premise that I am Here For, in a metaphysical sense. Let’s explore the societal impact of this unfolding calamity and really dig into how people afflicted react to it, and how society reacts to them. That is the direction you’re going to take, right Recursion? You’re not going to immediately shift gears into a mystery plot where Cop Guy tracks down the mysterious memory hotel at the heart of the phenomenon and confronts a sinister scientist? You’re not, right? Right?

God damn it.

It would be inaccurate to say that my interest in the book went from 100 to 0 as soon as I realized what direction the story was going in. There had been warning signs before then. The decision to have the main character be a detective gave me pause, since sticking in a murder mystery is a tried and true method of wrangling some narrative momentum into a premise that doesn’t inherently have any. It’s actually a bit worse here because Cop Guy isn’t even assigned to investigate the suicide that opens the book; he just does it of his own volition, for no particular reason.

The other thing that tripped me up early on about Recursion is the writing, which is…not bad exactly, but flat. As a random example, here’s the other POV character describing some really expensive wine:

“He goes to his wine fridge and takes out a ’47 Cheval Blanc. It takes him a moment to remove the delicate cork, and then he empties the bottle into a crystal decanter. 

“Not too much of this left in the world,” he says. 

The moment Helena lifts the glass to her nose and inhales the sweet, spicy perfume of the ancient grapes, her concept of what wine can be is irrevocably altered.”

It’s like I can taste it.

This might not have been an issue if not for the fact that pretty much everything is narrated in this same bloodless manner. Cop Guy suddenly starting to remember a parallel life should be terrifying and delirium-inducing, but it’s described with the same creativity as the minutiae of his travel arrangements. Consequently, the book doesn’t communicate the mind-bending nature of False Memory Syndrome, which in turn undermines the havoc it’s meant to be wreaking on its sufferers.

Not that that matters, because as stated, the book appears to get away from that topic as quickly as possible and into the potboiler thriller plot that its prose is much more suited to.

I have to add the disclaimer here that my migraines have been very bad lately (which is why this post is so short), and it’s entirely possible that I would have had more patience with Recursion if I was feeling better. But then again, maybe not; there are few things that frustrate me more than wasted potential.