A plague of beliefs
Alan Heathcock paints a future of biblical catastrophe driven by our increasingly righteous ideological rifts
A decade ago, Alan Heathcock, author of the 2011 short story collection “Volt,” began to notice something happening across the United States: a growing divide between people of varying ideologies.
“What I saw was a withering desire to empathize with anyone outside of their particular camp and a coarsening of the discourse that, to me, sounded violent,” the author says on a recent phone call from Boise, Idaho. “I started to imagine trajectories that would lead towards a certain kind of destruction.”
That observation would go on to shape “40,” Heathcock's new novel from MCD/Farrar Straus and Giroux. In it, he weaves elements of fantasy into a tale of a not-so-distant U.S. future marked by war and environmental catastrophes. “I think of it as a secular Bible story,” says Heathcock. The title is a nod to the 40 days and 40 nights Noah and his family spent on the ark during the flood in Genesis.
Like a biblical character, protagonist Mazzy is a fairly ordinary person from California who lands in extraordinary circumstances — in her case, she gains wings. Her reaction to the book's events is complicated and not always heroic. For Heathcock, the character is a response to the modern superhero genre, with characters who have “special powers and incredible bravery” and a nod to tales like Noah's post-flood drunkenness.
“I thought that would be more interesting and more appropriate to the moment which we're living in for the story I wanted to write,” says Heathcock.
Back in 2012, when he first envisioned what “40” could be, Heathcock didn't quite anticipate the turbulence that would mark the rest of the decade and the start of the 2020s. In fact, he restarted the book on five occasions. “A large part of that was that it was just a moving target,” Heathcock says. “Things were changing so fast in America and the world on a lot of different fronts that I kept feeling I'm not getting it. The world is getting ahead of me. I need to try again.”
By 2019, Heathcock had finished “40” — or so he thought. When the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the publication, he not only had more time to work on the book, but it was a global event that would, to some extent, impact the novel. “I had to recognize that, in the future, they would have to acknowledge that at some time we lived through an era of a pandemic,” he says. “I had to inject that every once in a while.”
However, one theme that had been a part of “40” from the get-go is climate change. “As we as people are scrambling around arguing about this and this, we had this larger, overarching story of climate that's becoming increasingly belligerent, and we can't seem to recognize that that's going to play a huge role in our ability to have a stable civilization,” he says. “The polls come out all the time in what people's top priorities are in actions from the government, and climate change is always down pretty low on that list. That, in and of itself, is becoming more and more scary.”
In “40,” the characters exist in a country that hasn't just been impacted by war and a major earthquake, but by megastorms and wildfires. Heathcock, who grew up in the Midwest and now lives in Idaho, can see how those who haven't felt the impact of wildfires in the Western United States might not grasp the devastation they cause.
“If there's a flood, you can find high ground. Tornadoes, you go down to your cellar,” he says. “These wildfires, the smoke just gets over everything. It affects every part of your life. You're constantly aware of these fires, and they're just getting bigger every year.”
Even in the West, though, there are plenty who have yet to grapple with the seriousness of the situation. “In the state where I live, there's more than a fair amount of denial around the whole thing,” he says, mentioning that fireworks remain popular despite the risk of a blaze that comes from lighting them off. “It happens every summer.”
A particularly poignant moment in the novel is when the character Jo Sam says to Mazzy, “People believe not what is true, but what they want to be true.”
“People have been convinced to believe in things that, with time, will be proven to be wrong or flawed, but at the time, they're brought into this powerful want of belief that causes tremendous harm,” Heathcock explains.
“Certainly, we're seeing it play out right now in very scary ways with even scarier potentials and trajectories,” he adds, “but we see it every day and it's exacerbated by social media, the constant prevalence of messages being sent out and the ability now for people to remain in their camps of ideology and seek out information that only validates the thing that makes them feel most righteous.”
And that human impulse is a driving force in this novel. “I think that the novel, in its essence, is about belief and the dangers of belief, how belief functions within a culture and how that's exploited,” says Heathcock. “It always has been exploited and it's being exploited now with the trajectory of destruction.”