Hearts and minds
Thomas Pierce offers a fascinating glimpse of small town America, then adds a twist, writes Daryl Gregory
In Thomas Pierce’s warm and inventive debut novel The Afterlives, reality is slippery, time is out of joint and profound disorientation is a feature of daily existence. The narrator, Jim Byrd, is a 33-yearold mortgage loan officer who’s already leading a liminal existence when the book opens. He’s just woken up after a cardiac arrest that left him clinically dead for several minutes, with no memory of the other side: “No lights, no tunnels, no angels.” The doctors place in his chest a hightech defibrillator called the Heartnet, whose accompanying smartphone app chimes whenever the device restarts his heart – a digital bell that tolls for him – and then send him home to Shula, North Carolina.
Pierce renders Jim’s hometown with a gloss of Phildickian satire. There is a “boutique virus” one can have injected into one’s eyes to change their colour, condoms that turn green when they detect disease and freerange holograms, all of which make Jim wonder if he’s “been brought back to life on the wrong planet.” When he runs into Annie, his high school sweetheart who has moved back to town with her 12-year-old daughter, he confesses, “Sometimes I feel like maybe I’ve had a brain injury and didn’t realise it.”
Those holograms aren’t the only ghostly presences in the novel. Annie’s a recent widow, and her dead husband is never far out of mind as Jim and Annie fall in love and eventually marry. And then one day Jim hears a tape of a disembodied voice recorded in a nearby house, which leads to more supernatural experiences, including one that involves Jim’s conspiracy-loving father. Jim begins following the writings of Sally Zinker, a physicist whose “daisy theory” – a lovely bit of rubber science that Pierce previously used in a story from his fine collection, Hall of Small Mammals – may explain the apparitions. At any given moment, Zinker explains, “the universe only 93 per cent existed. You only 93 per cent existed.”
The feeling that nothing’s quite real – that perhaps everything is a fever dream in Jim’s dying brain – nags at him, and the reader, too. In the first quarter of the book I was held back from investing too much in the story because it seemed as if the metaphysical rug was about to be pulled out from under us. What kept drawing me in, however, was Pierce’s clear prose and fine eye for emotional detail. I liked how Jim and his father know each other well enough to communicate “through a Morse code of sighing.” Or how Jim can’t express his jealousy of Annie’s dead husband, even though he suspects that “in the audience of her heart a front-row seat was forever reserved for a person who was never going to arrive.”
At regular intervals Pierce breaks from Jim’s story to tell us about previous residents of Shula, born a hundred years ago, who have
something to do with that haunted house. Their stories are told in short passages, presented out of order and in the present tense, as if these stillvibrant personalities are inhabiting all moments, simultaneously old, young and middle-aged. Pierce is brilliant at painting an entire life – encompassing passion, missed opportunities, tragedy – in a few pages.
He also isn’t afraid to pose the biggest questions: how do we deal with loss? What are the limits and possibilities of love? What is the nature of time? Jim and Annie, in pursuit of answers, track down Zinker and her “reunion machine,” which promises to unite the living and the dead. In The Afterlives, Pierce has worked a similar magic, connecting us to fictional characters who seem, somehow, 100 per cent real.