“An astute, discomfiting journey into a wasteland.” run and hide
lover, Tag prevents troubled Caleb Miller from throwing himself off a bridge into the Chicago River. He runs away and sets off a bomb in Chinatown. Looking for answers about Caleb’s behavior, Tag meets with his psychiatrist, Dr. Seth Jacobson, a noted expert on past life regression therapy. It turns out that Jacobson has used hypnosis to awaken remarkably detailed memories of earlier lives in both Caleb and corporate accountant Gerald Cutter, another Son of Elijah, who vanished after killing his wife in a reversal of their usual BDSM roles. Determined to find out more, Tag persuades Jacobson to hypnotize her, unleashing some shocking memories of her own past lives. The news that the particle accelerator at Fermilab is Caleb’s likely target brings Tag together with Fermilab director Dr. Alex Torres, a researcher hunting for the Big C Particle, the seat of human consciousness. Given the stakes, which of these expert authorities can she really trust? A wildly ambitious thriller that reaches for the skies in ways some readers will like a lot better than others.
RUN AND HIDE
Mishra, Pankaj Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) $27.00 | March 1, 2022 978-0-3746-0752-4 An intense, probing novel examines rampant materialism and spiritual bankruptcy. Reprising concerns that informed several previous books, Mishra examines the consequences of capitalism, globalization, and the violence of greed on communities, families, and individuals. The narrator is Arun, who tells the story of his life and those of his friends Aseem and Virendra to Alia, a young writer aiming to expose the “Hollow Men” who have emerged from the so-called rise of the New India. Yearning to escape the squalor and humiliating caste system that marked their youth, the three, through dogged efforts, are accepted as students in a technical institute which, they believe, will launch them into a better future. “To be modern,” Aseem often repeats, “is to trample on the past; it is to take charge, to decide being something rather than nothing, active rather than passive, a decision-maker rather than a drifter.” Seduced by “fantasies of power,” money, and sex, Aseem and Virenda reinvent themselves: In New York, Virenda becomes a billionaire. Aseem, failing as a writer of literary fiction—like Naipaul, whom he venerates as “the prototype of the early twenty-first-century globalised man”—instead finds celebrity “as an environmental activist, cultural impresario and intellectual entrepreneur of the Global South.” Awash in money, he hobnobs with the international glitterati. Arun, meanwhile, beset by “a kind of guilt at wanting too much from the world,” retreats to a Himalayan village where he works as a translator. Yet he, too, is lured to the West, following Alia. Through Arun’s observations of educated, well-heeled liberals—Westerners and Westernized Indians—Mishra underscores the hypocrisy and pretentiousness of their overstressed “political and ideological 30
|
1 january 2022
|
fiction
|
kirkus.com
|
