Barrelhouse Reviews: Anthropica, by David Hollander

Review by Max Halper

Animal Riot Press / August, 2020 / 502 pp

There’s a scene in David Hollander’s Anthropica in which a ten-year-old boy, sitting on the railing of a bridge overlooking a deep gorge, attempts to determine the trajectory of leaves he drops from the top. When he cannot—or when he concludes that each leaf’s trajectory is predetermined by forces beyond his narrow purview—he reasons that so too is the trajectory of his life predetermined, and of all life, and with this perfectly healthy ten-year-old’s capitulation to an inescapable fatalism, he decides to jump.

Thus goes Anthropica’s most uplifting scene. In another, a scrappy and yet hapless Ultimate Frisbee™ player stumbles upon research that proves humanity exhausts the earth’s resources every 30 days. Unsure what to do with this information, he slinks upstairs to have ghoulish sex with his best friend’s “sort of scary-looking” mom. This scene in particular marks the novel’s binary star-system of theses: unsustainability of both ecological and emotional enterprises. Here is a chronic and morbid obesity of the human condition, both interior and exterior, that should long ago have been humanity’s undoing. And yet somehow this unsustainability, as a sick prank that Anthropica manages first to uncover and then to abet, refuses to collapse in on itself, perpetuating a recurring system of depletion and satiation in which humanity is invariably stuck.

Anthropica is an encyclopedic novel in the tradition of Pynchon but with a keen and pared eye for the pains and pitfalls of the 21st century. It employs a sprawling—often dizzyingly so—ensemble cast of spiritually starved characters. At its center is a shadowy doomsday cult piloted by a Hungarian nihilist with a disdain for humanity and a penchant for bizarre theatrics; not only do his henchmen dress in full-body spermatozoa costumes, but he hosts regular screenings of The Matrix during which he recites its dialogue like a sermon. The cult busily recruits a diverse collection of folks whose only shared quality is an existential despair so profound that recruitment to the cult might easily be inferred as a stand-in for death by suicide. Among these recruits are a disillusioned professor and perpetually aspiring novelist who’s all but given up on her literary ambitions; a terminally ill man with nothing left to gain or lose; a graduate student whose thesis on an “esoteric branch of fractal mathematics” concerned with parsing patterns for signs of God—along with his hot, compassionate, and unyieldingly loyal girlfriend—are not enough to stave off his instinct for self-destruction; and a serially cuckolded scientist whose research reveals that humanity consumes more of earth’s natural resources than there are natural resources to be consumed. (This research is one of the novel’s central conceits, and inspires in all those who encounter it—from the aforementioned Ultimate Frisbee™ player to the Hungarian cult leader and his acolytes—an unshakeable fatalism through which any and all of their bleaker aspirations are justified.) And it is by way of the voices of this band of dejected antiheroes that Anthropica poses an alarming and timely question: With all we have, why are we still so unhappy?

One might argue that the entire 21st century artistic canon is concerned in one way or another with scrutinizing humanity’s consumptive habits. And yet Hollander extracts newness from this concept, both in content and form. Anthropica contains brazen descriptions of the invisible energies that suture one operation of human life to another, whether it’s running the sink or falling in love, and the innumerable and often destructive consequences of these seemingly innocuous operations. One scene, in which two characters have sex in a shower, shifts its focus from carnal mechanics to gaze down the shower’s drain and wonder “…how many billions of gallons might be consumed by this process, how many sewage systems were filling with the runoff, how many reservoirs and natural bodies of water would be required to sustain such a process… how there were nearly eight billion humans who needed to drink and wash and shave and cook…” I for one can no longer turn on a light switch without agonizing over who might be committing adultery as a result. And in my new dark world I’ve found other formerly casual gestures equally fraught with danger, from starting my car to indulging a stray thought about my own greatness.

Consequence abounds in Hollander’s Anthropica, and nothing is unattached. And though these might all sound like great reasons not to read the book, I cannot omit what’s been gained from my reading, which is a deeper and keener insight into the risks inherent in even the plainest moments of my existence, a critical eye on my own role in the unsustainable practices of 21st century life. While these insights are not always pleasant, few meaningful insights are.

The novel neither strays too deeply into complexity nor apologizes for its fierce intelligence. Formwise, it employs carefully crafted involution—winding, multi-clausal sentences that end up contextually distant from their origins and yet enfolded in the same contention—and breathless, grammatically unstable interior monologues. Not to mention a handful of conversations between three sentient robots. And it’s funny, often unsettlingly so given the objectively depressing subject matter. Which, in my view, is the novel’s grandest achievement. Anthropica is a deceptive, chimeric novel that comports itself with deft multivalence; it may shake hands like David Foster Wallace, but it hugs like Terry Pratchett, and it pulls your hair like Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

Anthropica is David Hollander’s second novel, and his first in twenty years. It reads like a book by a suppressed novelist hard at work, exemplifying a carefully cultivated postmodern technique without suffering from the usual postmodern ailment of brining in its own zaniness. Rather, Anthropica is a sincere novel, genuinely concerned with the plight of humanity’s rampant consumption, humanity’s unquenchable loneliness, and brain-hemorrhaging questions about whether, even if we wanted to, we could choose to live differently. Or choose anything at all.

Max Halper’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southampton Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Post Road and elsewhere. He lives in upstate New York.