Review of How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

I live in Poland, a country full of highly independent-minded people. Garroulousness, striking your own path, and being a success following your own logic are key elements of one's identity. It's in extreme juxtaposition to the fact a high percentage of Poles are Catholics who bend the knee, chant about guilt, and stand with hands meekly folded on Sunday. But such is the paradox of humanity. Exploring the mortal side of this contradiction in variegated form is Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark (2022).

How High We Go in the Dark is not a typical novel. Located somewhere between a short-story collection and full-length novel, each chapter is in fact a new point of view, disparate from the others by place and time but part of a whole. Binding the stories together is humanity's response to a plague. With global warming, caveman remains are exposed in the Arctic, releasing a long dormant virus. From the beginning of the plague to thousands of years in the future, How High We Go in the Dark surveys individual people's relationship to the tragedy the plague. From parents losing children to researchers, ordinary people to space colonists, Nagamatsu covers the entirety.

How High We Go in the Dark has the structure (and rock music sub-motif) of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. Each chapter is a new point of view, which by the end forms a network of semi-interlinked stories telling the whole. But the content has the flavor of Ted Chiang. Fully science fiction and focused on the human side of change, Nagamatsu often touches nerves and feelings relaying his characters experiences with plague, social change, and technological change, typically in melancholic fashion.

And Nagamatsu pulls it off. Egan and Chiang are regarded authors, and How High We Go in the Dark is on par with their work. For me, there are a couple moments the book jumps the shark (looking at you sentient swine and singularity in a man's mind), and yet there are others that stick like a dart. The rollercoaster of death (more humane than it sounds) is both a terrifying and loving form of euthanasia, and the death hotel possesses far more than one facet of humanity's response to grief.

In the end, readers who enjoy Chiang and Egan, as well as Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven would do themselves well to check out this novel. By showcasing humanity's collective response to mass tragedy through the eyes of a dozen+ unique characters, the message has an enduring quality. Like Camus, it sticks its middle finger up at the suffering of existence and mortality, yet wholly acknowledges existence would not be possible without them. The novel will be making my short list for best of 2022.