Our Tragic Universe Book

Sigh. Scarlett Thomas -- you are endlessly frustrating.

Thomas is clearly intelligent; the ideas and concepts she weaves into her novels are bright, interesting, and fairly potent. The thing is...she knows she's intelligent. And it seems pretty important to her for you, the reader, to know it, too. It's not even that she's pretentious, or that her stories are -- well, not always, anyway -- but that she is so focused on her bright ideas that the stories themselves become...incidental. The End of Mr. Y, PopCo, now Our Tragic Universe -- whether intentionally or not, the plots get lost in the Socratic-method shuffle of characters drinking wine and chatting about big ideas. In every conversation. I wish I knew as many intellectuals as supposedly lonely Meg does.

Now, I wouldn't say this is inherently a bad thing -- in fact, it's always nice to get some new (or at least newly-stated) ideas about metafiction, the artifice of narrative, and so on. And her characters, while (probably intentionally) not exactly likeable, are interesting archetypes and pastiches thereof. And, Thomas hits the nail on the head when her protagonist tells a friend to "fictionalise" his would-be scientific theory -- big ideas like those in Our Tragic Universe work best in fiction, when they aren't brought down by non-fiction's search for proof. But there are only so many times an author can use the same basic story as a vehicle for new ideas (brilliant down-on-her-luck broke female thirty-something protagonist with interest in older man sending her on literary/culturally revelatory quest [or questlike non-quest]? She's already written that book...twice) before it gets obvious, and irritating.

This is one of few cases, however, where an ending really saves it. Whereas in The End of Mr. Y, the book started strong and fizzled out, Our Tragic Universe really gives its ideological punch in the last 100-or-so pages. Nothing is "properly" resolved, though it's all been set up to be -- and that, for the genre-guzzling reader, is frustrating. As, of course, it's meant to be.


To be frustrating, though, isn't all that bad. Thomas wants to provoke her audience, and that's just what she's doing. I may find fault with her method, and the fact that she's as guilty of re-using plot/character/genre conventions as Meg ---- but ultimately, she pulls it off. And storyless story or no, when a book has this much impact -- it's worth that fourth star.