Half Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: good balloon, own fever, conjoined twin, Too Bad, Chris Marchpane, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A virtuosic but gimmicky fantasy, Jackson's first novel imagines an alternate present where chemical fallout has made Siamese twins a vocal, politically active subculture. Nora Olney, 28, is a torso-conjoined bohemian "twofer" in San Francisco whose twin, Blanche, has been comatose for 15 years. At ease in neither twofer culture nor the single world, and accustomed to controlling her and Blanche's body fully, Nora decides to have "doctor-assisted individuality surgery," appealing to the shadowy Unity Foundation for surgical help—even though its legal status is uncertain at best, and it will mean Blanche's death. Arriving in London and threading through the thicket of misdirection that the foundation uses for cover, Nora's reality warps: inanimate objects talk; she throws things unintentionally. As she moves closer to the surgery, Nora must contemplate the possibility that Blanche is trying to communicate with her. Jackson—author of a short story collection; a "work" (titled Skin) composed solely of tattoos on the bodies of willing participants; and the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl—gives equal time to the twins' eccentric upbringing in Too Bad, Nev., and the (often humorous) ephemera that Nora collects for her scrapbook, "The Siamese Reference Manual." Jackson's prose is nothing short of dazzling, but it's still not enough to give real tension to her oddball plot. (July 3)
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From The Washington Post

Shelley Jackson's first novel, Patchwork Girl, reconfigured the elements of the Frankenstein myth into a postmodern mosaic. To suggest themes of fragmentation, she composed the novel in hypertext, the link-peppered interface of the Internet. Her second offering, "Skin," a story in progress, is slowly being written on the bodies of thousands of volunteers, each of whom has agreed to have a single word tattooed onto his or her person. Jackson, it seems fair to say, has so far been perfectly happy to labor outside the boundaries of mainstream publishing culture. One can't help but suspect that her biggest fans include plenty of MFA candidates, critical-theory cultists and experimental-fiction devotees who see her as an outré heroine and who privately hope that she never gets gobbled up by the middlebrow establishment.

To those who would prefer Jackson to remain on the lofty banks of the pomo literary fringe, I've got good news and bad news. First the bad: While waiting for the ink to dry on her "Skin" project, she has produced a new novel, Half Life, that for most of its 400-plus pages is a shimmering, dazzling delight, filled with the kind of humor and poignancy that should endear her to thousands of new readers who wouldn't know Kathy Acker from Kathie Lee Gifford. The strange and often touching story of Nora Olney's quest to rid herself of her conjoined twin sister, Blanche, is surprisingly conventional by Jackson's standards. Conventional, perhaps, but never predictable: Jackson combines the imagination of a born fabulist with the wit of a born satirist, and Half Life -- for a good long stretch, at least -- is a thrilling novel, by turns horrific, heartfelt and hysterically funny. If, toward the end, it can't sustain the rollicking narrative momentum it has built up, Jackson has created such a vividly weird world and populated it with such memorable characters that it's pretty easy to forgive her.

Jackson's alternative universe is much like the one we inhabit now, with a few key exceptions. In it, American remorse over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has led to the creation of a postwar National Penitence Ground in eastern Nevada, a "Proving Ground of American Sadness" where a "despondent American government [has] commenced organized hostilities against itself" in the form of repeated bombings. Among the unforeseen victims of this nuclear self-flagellation are the unborn, who summarily begin appearing in greatly increased numbers as conjoined twins: two heads on a single body. Blanche and Nora Olney constitute such a "twofer," as these twins are known, and grow up in the desert playing, bickering, going to school and trying -- like all kids -- not to feel like total freaks.

One day Blanche falls asleep and doesn't wake up. And so the adult Nora must continue to carry around the vestiges of her sister, who is not quite dead but not quite alive, either. On the upside, Nora's second head does buy her automatic entry into the ultra-cool, politically active twofer subculture, which is headquartered -- where else? -- in San Francisco, the historic haven for America's marginalized communities and the city Nora calls home.

When she's not attending twofer film festivals or shopping at Twice Blessed Books, the local twofer bookstore (sample titles from the self-help section: "First Person Plural" and "Thank You for Being Me"), she's fantasizing, morbidly and very privately, about cutting off Blanche's head and starting fresh as a singleton. Such a course of action, however, in addition to being highly illegal, would break the heart of her mother, who in middle age has fallen under the spell of the "Siamystics," a twofer-inspired New Age movement. And she'd never hear the end it from her roommate and best friend, Audrey, an avant-garde filmmaker who thinks she may be a twofer trapped in a singleton's body and who is constantly chiding Nora for her lack of community involvement.

Jackson is so good at so many things that it's hard to say when she's at her best. Is it when she's poking gentle fun at the earnest pieties of identity politics? (Twofers are big on promoting solidarity through sloganeering, manifesto-writing and the like. When she's conjuring up a near-perfect simile, as she does to describe a pack of desert vultures awaiting a woman's death? (They "occupied the rocks around her, looking formal and interested, like a committee.") When she has taken off on any one of many comic flights of fancy? (A list of twofer luxury items excerpted from a Skymall catalogue -- microfiber hoods, lightweight vertical pillows and the like -- is so funny that it demands to be read a second and third time; it gets funnier with each reading.) Maybe it's when, with Hitchcockian flair, she's skillfully constructing the narrative platform for her suspenseful climax: Nora's trip to London, where she plans to win her own autonomy by having Blanche surgically removed at an underground clinic.

With her obvious gift for storytelling, Jackson deserves to be widely read and critically celebrated. But the good news for fans of her more esoteric work -- bad news for the rest of us, I'm afraid -- is that she ultimately sabotages her own novel with an ending designed, apparently, to "lift" this novel from a mere great story to a graduate seminar on identity and its erasure. After winning us over with her sharp humor and careful plotting, she flirts dangerously with pedantry and obtuseness when trying to tie things up, as if she's afraid we might not recognize the Blanche/Nora pairing as a metaphor for our own divided natures. But the self-consciously discursive ending isn't enough to ruin the whole novel. By the time things start to unravel, Half Life has already done what great fiction is supposed to do: entertain us a lot, and change us just a little.

Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins (July 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060882352
• ISBN-13: 978-0060882358
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,077,470 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Almost brilliant...but then not, December 11, 2006

By	korper (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

The re-imagined world this book inhabits is nothing short of extraordinary. The minority "twofer" community holds a (cracked) mirror up to the gay and transgendered communities, feminism and religious minorities, pulling no punches with regards to any. Shelley Jackson has a rich imagination and a gift for prose and she knows it. During much of this book, I was rapt and swept up by the story.

What a disappointment, then, when it collapses into post-modern drudgery. Jackson lets her language get away from her in some passages (even after re-reading, I still have no clear idea of what happened to Nora and Blanche on the operating table), then completely loses her novel to gimmickry in the all-but-unreadable last 100 pages. The book's "Part Three" is so maddeningly self-referential that it's almost masturbatory -- a dull, seemingly endless list of overly thought-out entries in a "diary" that neither advances the story nor contributes fresh insights. "Part Four" tries to get back on track but instead settles for absurdity and evasion. Half Life's stubborn refusal to answer the multitude of questions it raises in its first three quarters could be read as Lynchian but instead comes off as a failed, half-baked writing experiment.

Too bad because there's a lot to admire in this book. I haven't read any of Shelley Jackson's other works, but I hope with her next book she drops the gimmicks and just tells a story. I'm sure it could be amazing.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An exceptional debut, September 5, 2006

By	Eric G. Anderson (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Comparisons to Nabokov are both inevitable -- the novel's first line pays homage to Lolita's opening -- and apt, as Jackson shares her predecessor's preoccupation with ambiguities of identity, authority, and signification, as well as all the opportunities for wordplay and symbology that these themes present. But Jackson's voice is also very much her own -- cynical, relentless, and very funny.

It hardly does the novel justice to call it densely layered. It can be read as a satire of identity politics, a meditation on semiotics, a critique of the nuclear age, a murder mystery (of sorts), a love story -- that's just for starters. Readers who have dipped a toe into post-structural theory should put this novel on their desert island reading list -- there's plenty to occupy them here. But the story is so firmly grounded in the visceral and emotional that readers in search of an un-deserted beach read won't be disappointed either.

I've read more Amazon reviews than I can count and have never posted one before now. This novel drove me to it. Heck, I'll probably get on board for her tattoo project too, if its success will spur more writing like this. Jackson deserves a big readership and other good things.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Surreal to the point of incoherence, March 16, 2007

By	Jamie Holcomb "jeholcomb" (Southwest Georgia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I picked up the book because the premise was intriguing, and it was compelling enough that I read all the way to the end. Gradually, though, it became surreal to the point of incoherence as Nora (or Blanche) experiences increasing hallucinations.

I'm not a lazy reader who can't tolerate any ambiguity or odd moments. But I feel that those pages should be a minority in a good book. Storytelling should come first. I am much more willing to wrestle with a difficult bit if I have something to work with. For the last hundred pages or so of this book, there just wasn't anything to grab on to. In addition, the frequent, unnecessary references to bodily functions were off-putting. If you like this sort of pretentious fiction, go right ahead- but if you like a book you can actually read, pick something else.