I guess it was inevitable that I’d eventually find a Percival Everett novel I didn’t love. I wouldn’t say I hated or even disliked American Desert, but it is my least favorite of the nine Everett novels I’ve read so far, primarily because what happens between the shocking opening and the superb conclusion is so disjointed.
Ted Street is a professor at USC who is married with two kids, often unfaithful, and about to be denied tenure. On his way to walk into the ocean to kill himself, his car is hit by a UPS driver, and he is decapitated. In the middle of his funeral, three days later, he sits up in his coffin – his head reattached by a clumsy mortician – and starts talking. Chaos ensues, Ted becomes a media sensation, and he finds himself stalked by religious nuts and government operatives. He also begins to see his own life with much greater clarity, and discovers that by touching someone he can see into their memories, which becomes one of the main ways he navigates his way out of trouble … which is how he spends most of the novel, as he’s hounded by all of those groups and just wants to get back to his family.
The premise of American Desert isn’t entirely new, but it’s still a strong start: If someone appears to truly come back from the dead three days later, there’s going to be a huge public reaction to it, from fascination to terror, from religious fervor to scientific inquiry, and media there to try to make a buck off it. It opens up questions about mind-body dualism, life after death, the meaning (or lack thereof) of life, and more. You’d get people claiming he was the Second Coming, and probably people trying to kill him, and every scientist and crackpot in the world would want a look.
Everett hits all of those points, more or less, with varying degrees of success. The main problem with American Desert is that his focus on sending up his targets in religion, science, and the government subsumes and ultimately overwhelms Ted, who becomes more of a pawn within the story than he should be. His character is inherently interesting, but the story doesn’t get very deep into his character, particularly the question of what, if anything, this second chance at life means for him. He recognizes that his first life was a series of screw-ups, and now he has not just a fresh (okay, perhaps a poor choice of words for an animated corpse) start, but he also sees the world, including his own life, very differently.
This a mild spoiler, although the book is twenty years old so I’m not too concerned, but one of the most fundamental issues with the construction of American Desert is that Ted is barely with his family in the book – in fact, his wife and kids end up going to Catalina Island for a weekend after he’s been kidnapped, leading to a whole separate and very uninteresting subplot around the three of them and Ted’s sister-in-law. The dynamic of a man returned from the very, unequivocally dead to his family, with a literal new lease on life, where he is fully aware of the harm he’s perpetrated and ways in which he’s failed his wife, kids, and himself would be fascinating. In the process of satirizing various institutions, however, Everett largely skips this part entirely. It made for a book that moved quickly, with lots of plot, but without the depth that characterizes all of the other eight of his novels I’ve read so far.
Next up: Dr. Susan David’s Emotional Agility.