Troy Bookclub Read #1
The Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
I don't have a hobby. I don't play sports and I don't follow sports. I read books. Which I don't really consider a hobby. I feel like with a hobby there's some sort of outward expression of the thing you occupy your time with. It's not like watching Netflix is considered a hobby. My partner is a long time Nerf gun modder. He has a Youtube Channel about it, he spends time with members of that community, he devotes hours of his free time to tinkering, and the end result is a very efficiently working blaster, something you can hold in your hand. That's a hobby. After I read a book—or several a month—there's not much to show for it other than an air of superiority and an ability to recognize other bibliophiles in social settings.
For book reading to be a hobby, you have to take it to the next level. Short of being a BookTuber or paid book reviewer, there's book clubs, which is an external purpose to reading.
Troy Book Club is the first book club I've ever been in. I've never felt particularly compelled to do so, as book clubs often get this bad rap of being something housewives do as an excuse to get out of the house and drink wine together. Before now, I have been perfectly content with book reading as a passive activity done in complete isolation. But being social as an adult is a hurdle that means you have to find ways other than alcohol to reach out and engage. Plus, while languishing in unemployment, one has a surfeit of time that is otherwise unavailable and it's best for one's mental health to find fulfilling activities to fill that time.
In the formulation of the club, the genres most interested in were polled for and a book amongst a selection by members that fit those genres was selected at random. First up, The Wanderers by Chuck Wendig.
Rating:
2/5 Stars
Bottom line, reading this book was a chore, compounded by the fact the book was 780 pages long. I'll admit, the first 200 pages flew by as the mystery built. But it was a mystery that through tortuous writing turned out to be thoroughly uninteresting once it was solved.
TLDR synopsis
[Warning: SPOILER ALERT]A flock of people start sleepwalking. They can't be stopped by any means. The American public and various government agencies loses their shit about whether it's terrorism or a disease or aliens or religious phenomena. SPOILER! There is a disease that will wipe out humanity and these sleepwalkers are the chosen survivors by a sentient Artificial Intelligence which it altered with nanobots.
That's it. Seriously. 780 pages of just building that up. I don't know what kind of editor let this book pass muster. If you read Google reviews of the book, you find a suspicious sparsity of critical reviews. No New York Times, The New Yorker, or any other usual suspects we expect to dig up literary gems and extol. As I read through the few ones that are available, I noticed a trend. Several, including NPR were mostly an extended synopsis of the book's set up and premise with comments about the writing style and general ambience of reading it. The only two lengthier reviews with concrete details or meant in them were on Tor and Spectrum Culture and were written by fans of Wendig's Star Wars novels.
This is quite telling...in that no one who reads and reviews books for a living actually read this book. I know what a summary review means. I've been there. You read the first third of the book to get a grip of the characters and the atmosphere and then last few chapters and bust out a review in half an hour, submit to your editor or publisher, get paid, and move onto the next. And DISCLAIMER: THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I DID WITH THIS BOOK.
Okay, I read half but, still. Yeesh.
Plenty to fully immerse in the story and still not be invested in it and more than enough to identify the problems, which convinced me I did not need to waste my time any further.
1. Male fantasy and privilege goggles
I'll admit it, I'm biased. When a book opens up with a teenage girl, a black doctor, and a gay man as three of the main protagonists written by a cisgendered straight white male, I'm extremely skeptical. Wendig's writing did nothing to disprove this. He committed the cardinal sin of telling and not showing. He didn't show how his characters experienced adversity and use prose to illustrate their feelings of being marginalized and othered. For example:
Arav, pg. 219, "They say the gunman was a lone wolf, but I'm not sure. Guys like that are never really lone wolves, you know? They're always worried about how us brown people are getting radicalized but nobody talks about how it happens to white people more than it happens to us. It's crazy."
pg. 290, "I'm a brown-skinned man in America, I know what it's like not to belong."
We're also told a lot of times how awkward it is when authority figures like police interact with Benji or how Pete is sure he can't come out as gay and it is painful for him. But none of it feels earned. Because we don't see it.
Lemme take a crack at it.
Shana notices one of the hicks pivot and starts towards Arav. Arav stops following the sleepwalker he's monitoring when he notices the military-esque buzzcut and swatstika tattoo heading in his direction. For a second he fumbles for his CDC badge, checking that it's visible on his chest. He stands his ground, but his shoulders are stiff and just a little bit hunched, like he's still cringing while standing perfectly straight.
Show, don't tell. The cardinal rule of fiction writing. Another general rule? Write what you know. While not every author lacks the imagination, empathy, and research ability to write outside their experience, Wendig did not seem equipped to adequately handle the diverse viewpoints he wanted to tell his story from. His character's diversity designation were leaned into in lieu of crafting an actual personality for them. More on that for Point #2.
I put privilege goggles because for Wendig, the threat of white nationalists is a bewildering phenomenon fueled by current events. It blends into the fear of the unknown and mystery surrounding the book's plot and the sci-fi element. But that has always been a real and present danger for minorities in American. We know where it stems from and it isn't just a handful of bad actors or ignorant hicks, as Wendig calls them. It's systemic and more importantly, it's real. Wendig wasn't even brave enough to even name any real white nationalist groups. They're just this broad, existential concept of what is rotten in our society. But that's what racism is to a white guy.
Now let's focus on the guy part. This was totally a dude novel (more on this in Point #3). Nothing was more evident of that fact than with Benji, the disgraced CDC expert who was just so freakin' good the CDC came crawling back to him to beg for his help and expertise when catastrophe hit. Plus he gets to sleep with a hot lady that's totally out of his league? This couldn't have been more on the nose than if his ex-wife suddenly appeared and told him their divorce was a mistake and he was the best thing that ever happened to her. Men especially have the fantasy of having their special brand of expertise validated (Ready Player One, anyone?). It's coded into all every-man narratives. That a character is inwardly special. They are the One. Everything they are and everything they have experienced has lead to this one pinnacle moment. But that Benji's is centered around his job expertise is so telling. Because what is so devastatingly masculine than having the most valuable thing about yourself be your job?
2. Characters are bland and passive
I think I've sufficiently complained about the male characters, but let's dive into the female characters. Except we can't because there's nothing to dive into. The female characters were really flat, almost devoid of their own, external motivations. As I said before, their chief personality traits were that they were women. All the men had a job-oriented role while the women were (as usual) relegated to care-takers, manipulators, mouth pieces, love interests, and child bearers. Shana has no personality outside of being a teenage girl and a teenaged girl from television, no less. Outwardly sassy, but fragile and anxious on the inside. She gets into fights with her dad, who just does not get it, you guys! It was her birthday and he didn't even remember because of all this apocalypse stuff going on. Then in the end she gets pregnant because this is the most important plot point women can be a part of.
To be fair, all the characters were pretty passive because they were all victims of this plot that was totally driving meanderingly forward completely without their imput. Usually characters' actions shape the plot. The plot doesn't happen to them, their choices drives the plot forward. Not so in The Wanderers. All the characters are just there for the ride, getting crumbs of information every two hundred pages or so. There is literally nothing for any of them to do. Which follows into my next point...
3. The tone is urgent but pace is plodding
This is supposed to be edge-of-the-apocalypse horror and everything is treated that way. Every page is saturated with dread. Every unknowable mystery of this phenomena could mean death or society-ending catastrophe. But that is dragged out for almost 800 pages. It gets old FAST. People in my book club said this read like if The Road had been adapted into a multi-season television show like The Walking Dead. It went on forever with these little B-plot story beats between the characters to allow you to get to know them and get invested in what happens to them in the overall plot. The problem is that you could guess the plot by page 400 (which is where I stopped) and then read the last 100 pages and pretty much still understand the story as a whole BECAUSE NOTHING IN THOSE OTHER 400 PAGES MATTERED.
At first I couldn't understand why I was having such a hard time with this book. It had a really interesting premise to start, but I couldn't seem to get into that groove I do when binge-reading a story-driven popcorn novel. There was something about the writing style of the book that was really turning me off and it suddenly hit me that for the past couple years, I had stopped reading books by male authors. It's not because I hate male authors, it's just that female written books had begun to appeal to me more for their atmospheric style. Wendig wrote this book like the plot was uber-important, that this book was uber-important and had something to say about the world. I needed to pay attention to what was happening because it was going to be a big deal in the end. And I just didn't really care when nothing was actually happening on the page. The walkers were walking. The world was being reactive towards the walkers. The CDC people were confused. The shepherds were worrying. Without characters grounding you to their experience, I didn't buy into why the plot was important.
I think all the female authors I've come to enjoy (Sally Rooney, Celeste Ng) try to build their narratives for you to fall in love with. Male authors are instead clamoring for your attention.
4. Observant but not woke
There were so many different commentaries in this book: the rise of technology/AI, media misinformation, internet reactivity, class struggles, racism, government intervention, capitalism, scientific distrust, and many others. In reviews, this book was constantly heralded as an insightful look into today's problems. I found that it identified problems and attempted to magnify it with this sci-fi settings, but it didn't say anything new about any of it. For instance, there was definitely a Walt Disney stand-in here who dies a horrible death that precipitates a contagion due to greed, but like...other than being an on the nose allegory, what point are you making besides millionaires and corporations not caring about the rest of society. So what? I read Jacobin and Bernie Sanders FB memes too, my dude. What exactly are you adding to the conversation? I'm not asking for solutions, but maybe a nuanced perspective or presenting a question that could only be explored through a fictional scenario? This is, I believe, the purpose of writing fiction.
Similarly, you don't get wokeness points for pointing out racism, you are woke for being able to understand how racism fits in society and have a meaningful dialogue about it. I'm not saying the way Wendig tackled this in The Wanderers was bad, it just wasn't particularly deep. And with 800 pages, you would think that he at least would have explored at least one of these topics in depth. Instead we got a bloated novel that tried to be overly ambitious with too many concepts.
5. Indicting but not insightful
In the end, Wendig points a lot of fingers at issues without tackling any head on and the writing itself wasn't interesting enough to at least be an entertaining ride. Would not recommend to anyone other than die-hard fans who already liked Wendig's previous works. However, credit to where it is due, Wendig is pretty funny on Twitter.