A trend of declining trust has been underway across the western world for many years, even decades, as copious survey evidence attests. Trust, and its absence, became a preoccupation for policymakers and business leaders during the 1990s and early 2000s. They feared that shrinking trust led to higher rates of crime and less cohesive communities, producing costs that would be picked up by the state.
What nobody foresaw was that, when trust sinks beneath a certain point, many people may come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham. This happens not because trust in general declines, but because key public figures – notably politicians and journalists – are perceived as untrustworthy. It is those figures specifically tasked with representing society, either as elected representatives or as professional reporters, who have lost credibility.
Behind our convoy and down a hillside was the great salt flat called Salar Grande, a scorching, parched expanse about the size of San Francisco Bay. Ahead of my silver SUV, I saw a rolling Martian world of sand-colored rock spread beneath a blazing blue sky. No mosquitoes buzzed near our ears; no birds flew overhead. Wilhelm walked a few dozen feet away from the convoy, stopped, and stooped. Then everyone saw it.
A pebble field roughly the area of a two-car garage was dappled with chartreuse flakes: lichen. The first life we’d seen in days. Wilhelm crouched in the heat and squinted, flashing her hot-pink eyeshadow. She scooped some rocks into a sterile canister.
Later, Wilhelm would ship the rocks to her lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Silicon Valley, where she works as an astrobiologist. She would scrape bits of lichen from the rocks, liquefy them, and sequence their DNA. She would do the same for microbes she collected from ravines, and preserved cells she scraped from salt rocks. In many places in the Atacama, such hardy creatures are the only life forms, and Wilhelm and other scientists think that they might be similar to the last surviving life on Mars—if Martian life ever existed.
When Brigid Hughes began her career as a 22-year-old intern at the Paris Review, she was told by George Plimpton that there were three things she’d need to learn in order to succeed at the job: how to play pool, how to drink scotch, and, lastly, the art of reading and editing.
“Those were the defining qualities of my time there,” she recalled to me recently, over lunch in a French café in Fort Greene close to her office—the converted carriage-house on a leafy side-street that is home to A Public Space, the Brooklyn-based literary journal she founded in 2006 and continues to edit. “I did learn to drink scotch. I did learn to play pool, poorly.”
Joyce Carol Oates is mistress of instability – quicksand her element here. She writes convincingly about the pervasive misery of living in fear, the loneliness of it. More hearteningly, she shows that superior moral sense is stubborn: staying curious and putting herself into involuntary jeopardy is Mary Ellen’s forte. Oates adds in sketchy questions about authenticity, behaviourism, art and virtual reality. Wainscotia is revealed to be a “hotbed of mediocrity” (it is fun scrutinising the also-ran rhymes of one of its lauded poets). But the novel’s biggest idea is that time itself is political: “America is founded upon amnesia – denial”, Oates writes. And the ending – without giving anything away – is wrong-footing, alarming, compromising.
This is one of the things that makes Scalzi such an important figure in literature, he doesn’t go the easy route of just writing a story — instead he fills it with important messages. In all this vast space of countless planets, the fact that only one might be capable of supporting humanity really brings the crisis into focus.
If you follow the author’s clues, you may feel a chill up your spine. You may see the waiter in a different light. Maybe. Just because the clues are there doesn’t mean they’ve been used to best effect. You can read this surprising book several different ways.