I fell for the jacket summary on this one. The story is told by a professor trying to finish a book on the Civil War. He's hanging out at an estate called Halcyon, owned by a lawyer. The twist is, Al Gore is president, the lawyer has been raised from the dead with new medical technology. The "alternate reality" approach was intriguing at first and I kept getting pulled through the story to see what could have happened. In the end, nothing changes - our culture and national outlook lead to the same results. The ending was unsatisfying and abrupt. I liked the writing style and found many admirable turns of a phrase quoted below.
Quotes:
"A low sky weighed on the earth, gradually absorbing the distance into the fog""...he never glanced back [at the presentation slides] for reference...He wouldn't think to, in much the same way a dancer would never think to mouth the count of his steps.""Never forget history is what the living think of the dead""The thing of it is you can have more than one life, but there's only this one world to live it in.""You really think I want to live life, parsing who did what to me and when, and how come that means I can never achieve x or become y, trapped in an endless feedback loop of my own trauma? That's not progress."
Published: 2023 Read: October 2023 Genre: Fiction
