New Yorker Fiction Review #257: "Suffocation Theory" by David Rabe

 

Review of the short story from the Oct. 12, 2020 issue of The New Yorker...

The level of modern-day anxiety, environmental panic, looming violence, and social dis-ease in this story, and the immediacy of the writing, made me think this was the product of a 20-something writer imagining a world she was going to have to inhabit in the very near future. This did not strike me as the work of a writer nearly 80 years old (which it is) drawing a nightmarish picture of a world he will very likely not have to inhabit, as it seems about 20 years away or so (we hope), assuming it ever gets this bad and it may already be for some people.

The reality depicted in "Suffocation Theory" is not hard to imagine, just turn up the volume on some of the problems we have today -- fast-moving environmental degradation, a reckless, egomaniacal president, climate-induced migration, gun violence, economic disruption -- from level three to about level eight (hopefully not to 11...). Does this kind of "twisted near-future" story do any good at all, I wonder? I think it does. If nothing else, it offers an arresting look the present state of affairs and a nightmare scenario of how bad things could potentially get; it is as though David Rabe is holding up a fun-house mirror to our current reality. 

Visions of the future -- pleasant or unpleasant -- necessarily spring from a particular time-period, themselves. Remember when the future actually looked bright? I'm thinking now of the 2015 depicted in the film Back to the Future II. Viewed from 1989, the year 2015 looked clean and bright and technologically impressive. Right now, 2020 feels more like the "alternate" Hill Valley controlled by Biff Tannen in 1985. 

It seems like, as a society, we lost our ability to imagine a future that is not completely f*cked somewhere in the early 2000s. Since then, the future -- in just about every movie or piece of literature -- is a smoking landscape of rubble and destruction in which it is always cloudy and everyone is fighting for their lives. Is this vision of the future any more accurate than a positive one, in which we as a society have started to fix some of our looming problems? No one can say. But I find it equally as possible to believe that we figure out a way to create a bright future for ourselves as to believe that we turn the world into a stinking mass of burning garbage. 

Maybe we need to hold visions in our heads like the one conjured up in "Suffocation Theory" for a while longer before we actually decide that this is not the kind of future we want. Then, maybe, we can start imagining a bright future again, one with hover-boards and fluorescent clothing that automatically adjusts to fit you, and robots that serve martinis. 

Comments

Unknown said…
Why is it that Everyone who wants too feel good about the Future ,knows Nothing about how things Work? (Reality).the world ,Is how things work!These people say they Believe in Science .but ,they know Nothing about it.They all went to College ,but what did they learn ? How to feel good ,that's what education is now. Well ,the world Is Facts. These people are Not the solution.They ; Are Not positive .They Are Negative .Trump was just the symptom . Their Lazy thinking Is, the disease.

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