Half Life: A Novel [Paperback]

Shelley Jackson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 3, 2007

Nora and Blanche are conjoined twins. Nora is strong, funny, and deeply independent, thirsting for love and adventure. Blanche, by contrast, has been asleep for twenty years. Sick of carrying her sister's dead weight, Nora wants her other half gone for good—a desire that takes her from San Francisco to London in search of the Unity Foundation, a mysterious organization that promises to make two one. But once in England, Nora's past begins to surface in surprising and disturbing ways, pushing her to the brink of insanity and forcing her to question her own—and Blanche's—grip on the truth.

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Jackson's reputation has been built on experimental fiction, including the hypertext Patchwork Girl. But here, in what is being billed as her first novel, she reveals herself to be adept with traditional narrative as well, although the story itself is far from typical. In an alternate-universe version of America, conjoined twins have become relatively commonplace, probably due to radioactive fallout (although twofer activists claim that history has covered up the fact that many prominent people were conjoined, including Copernicus and Mark Twain). We experience this world through Nora, who ridicules the twofer subculture (which includes its own hilarious grammar--theirstory instead of history; tyou instead of you, etc.) and desperately wants to be free of her sleeping twin, Blanche. The intricate structure and ebullient wordplay of the novel really begin to pay off when Nora and Blanche head to London in search of a doctor who will remove (and, in doing so, kill) Blanche, just as it becomes clear Blanche may not be sleeping. A clever and surprisingly moving exploration of identity and connectedness, Half Life should broaden Jackson's readership. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (July 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060882360
• ISBN-13: 978-0060882365
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,142,830 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Shelley Jackson has written and illustrated several books for children, including The Old Woman and the Wave (DK Children, 1998) and Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog (Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, 2002). Her most recent book, The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County by Janice Harrington (FSG, 2007), received several awards and starred reviews. Shelley's books for adults include The Melancholy of Anatomy (Anchor Books, 2002) and Half Life (HarperCollins, 2006). She is well known for her pioneering cross-genre experiments such as her groundbreaking hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl, and her ongoing Skin Project, a novella published exclusively in the form of tattoos on the skin of volunteers, one word at a time. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. To learn more, please visit her website: http://ineradicablestain.com/

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An exceptional debut, September 4, 2006

By 

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

This review is from: Half Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

11 of 12 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

This review is from: Half Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

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" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Half Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.