/lit/ - Literature

>>22338542
City of Truth - James Morrow (1991)

Jack Sperry lives in Veritas, the City of Truth. All its citizens are subjected to brainburn, which conditions them to feel excruciating pain if they say anything less than the complete truth. Jack works as a deconstructer, which means he destroys any and all lying art. He incinerates fiction, paintings, and films, demolishes statues, destroys counterfeits, and otherwise eliminates anything straying from the empirical. Truth is all the beauty ones needs.

I've read eight works of short fiction by James Morrow previously and haven't particularly liked any of them. I thought this this Nebula winning satirical novella might be better based on its premise, and it definitely was, for the duration that it was satirical. That's to say that it was comedy, a rather funny one for me, but that didn't last and I didn't take the tone shift well. It was quite the ride to go through three distinct moods in a novella. Narratively the experience of the protagonist and the reader are inverted. As the protagonist falls away from their idea of truth, the reader goes from mocking satire to sincere reality. For me it was like a friend telling you a funny story that has everyone laughing that segues into a trauma dump. To which my reaction was, "What? No. Stop." I wouldn't quite call it a bait and switch, but I'd really would've preferred that it stuck to the satire. Unfortunately, what comes after is probably the heart of the story.

If the humor doesn't work for you, it did for me, and what comes after doesn't, I can't say that you should read this. Some examples are, Jack, who is married, saying to a woman he just met: "I'd like to have sex with you", after noticing how voluptuous she is, or as is later said, zaftig. After a bit she replies with, "I feel only a mild, easily controlled desire to copulate with you." As soon as he meets with his wife they discuss how wants to have sex with this new woman. I found the deadpan dialogue to be amusing. The humor carries over into the exposition as well, with brutality squad members carrying Remington Metapenises, politicians openly proclaiming their corruption, businesses being entirely transparent, and men proclaiming how much they enjoy masturbating to beatoff magazine and make no pretension to reading its articles. The government even readily admits that there's no rational reason for their troops to be where they are and continually dying, but they're going to have them keep doing it anyway.

I can appreciate it for its allegory, but that doesn't mean that I have to enjoy it. I have no doubt that its message of, as interpreted by me: You can mock how others are living all that you want, but eventually you have to face yourself and take responsibility for your own life. You can't rely upon the assurances of certainty or the comforts of delusion. Regardless of whether I agree with it in theory, let alone practice it, it's not what I want to read.

Rating: 3/5