The future is nigh

least to me, when he begins to pontificate.

“The contagion spreads and spreads,” one of his futurists says cheerfully, “and nobody can disinfect it.” “Money’s the thing we made that owns us,” another offers. “Would you agree that all the major societies of Earth are broken?” a third inquires. “Those things that we call civilizations?”

Maybe. But this kind of knowingness is as naive as the obliviousness it critiques. Under the guise of telling us that the truth of the world is hidden, it tells us the truth of world is obvious: Everything is rotten. It’s all a big lie. The membranes between comfort and chaos are much thinner than we think.

Such an overridingly didactic mission makes the characters in “Normal” seem like interchangeable philosophical delivery systems, spouting off without the expectation of any conversational exchange. (“She was a nonstop talker, which made her hard to know,” Kurt Vonnegut once wrote.) The book’s plotting is superb — as was the plotting in “Gun Machine,” Ellis’ excellent previous novel, a police procedural — and its big twist is perfect, reversing expectations about that patient’s disappearance, and all those bugs on his bed.

But Adam, the only character granted more than a cursory biography, is nonetheless a cipher. By the time the full story of his breakdown arrives, it, and his journey at large, are more or less a matter of indifference to the reader.

In other words, “Normal” is an exemplary piece of speculative fiction, acutely observed, well made and, with its interesting array of predictions about the nearfuture, likely to satisfy Ellis’ numerous fans. At the same time, its vision of the world is without real depth, its author content to peddle some Wikiquote Nietzsche and a character named after the mythical Charon as deep profundities. There are a few thoughtful passages about our present relationship to nature that hint at a deeper engagement with the question of technology, but they’re not enough to truly run interference with Ellis’ declinist message.

This is an era of particular excellence for futurist novels. “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson — another author who has aged into his own prognostications — is a masterpiece; and this year’s “Zero K,” by Don DeLillo, was a weird piece of magic, a long meditation on what death might mean to our descendants, and therefore what it means to us now.

“Normal,” with its satisfying narrative and quicksilver eye, is in some ways a match for those novels. But it lacks their exhilarating sense of expansiveness, which comes from watching how actual humans, flesh and blood, might move through the future — the next version of it, anyway.