The Postmortal: A Review
I have been a fan of Drew Magary for quite a while, mostly from the two online websites he writes his cheeky, sports-focused columns for Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber.I then read his first book, Men With Balls, a satirical "how-to" guide for, potentially, emerging athletes.
Magary always has a great way with words, but he's always been focused around the same basic subjects. (Read Deadspin for some of those saltier topics, if you'd like.) So, when I heard he'd written a novel, based on the discovery of a drug that essentially cures mortality, I was both excited and a little nervous. When I got an advance copy to review, I was thrilled and devoured it in no time at all.
The Postmortal, due to be published at the end of August, is a triumph - combining Magary's trademark wit with great storytelling and some keen insight into what really would happen if a drug was invented that stopped people from aging. The book is told as a "discovered history" before "The Correction" so, quickly, one knows this doesn't end out so well. But from there, it unfolds in the same progression that one might expect would happen in reality -- one man decides he'll spend a year in every country on earth, then get back to his wife (who, of course, will still be 29); others divorce en masse, having decided that a marital contract for life meant something entirely different when one expected to die after 50 years or so, and generally cavorting happens everywhere.
On a darker side, many are morally outraged by postmortals and both a disturbing cult and a faction of gangster thugs emerge to protest this in a myriad of ways. All the time, John Farrell (our protagonist) is trying to sort things out, and haunted by an impossibly beautiful, curvy blonde he keeps seeing...
If there are gaps in the book, it's mostly by the format - we don't ever get to know Farrell all that well, to the extent that when his sister becomes an important character later in the book, I was surprised to learn (or remember) that he even had a sister. He's not a fully fleshed out character, though mostly he really doesn't need to be.
Mixed with more global insights (the world, for instance, quickly runs out of fish) and a larger comment about why mortality might not be so bad after all, The Postmortal is a delightful, often horrifying book from a truly talented writer. I'm looking forward to much, much more.
Rating: 8.5/10.0