Together We Will Go by J. Michael Straczynski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Whoosh. A rough, exhausting book to read, yet utterly engaging; one I was eager to keep reading and get to the conclusion, and then sad to have found I’d done so.
Maybe like life, that way.
Straczynski manages here to be both epic and intimate, tragic and triumphant, gritty and philosophical, artificial in manipulating the writer’s craft and narrative into almost unbelievable shapes, yet still managing to keep it all together and so utterly real in its individual parts that the shape of the story and the nigh-implausible events that occur during it seem no more remarkable and therefore no less believable. I laughed, I cried, I rolled my eyes, I stroked my chin and went hmmmm …
Even in its very tackling of subject of suicide, JMS tries, and manages, to have it both ways — both critical and accepting of the act. He seems to come down on the position of suicide is sometimes the better outcome for an individual, but because it’s not accepted (and, in fact, condemned and fear-mongered over) by society for a variety of reasons, it leads to people inadvertently lurching into it without enough thought, without the support of others. Unnecessary suicide becomes what is mourned here, suicide committed without self-awareness or self-control. Freedom, informed freedom even, is paramount here, on both sides of the equation. That’s in part why a book that ostensibly is about a band of strangers on a bus, headed toward a group suicide for their own, individual reasons, can with a straight face include a message about the National Suicide Hotline in its final pages.
JMS does all of this heavy lifting over the course of that long bus ride from coast to coast. But because a bunch of people talking about this stuff, with others or to themselves, would be boring, he brings in all sorts of complications, from interpersonal conflicts, to lies that call the whole trip into question, to people doubting whether this is the right course for them but whether they’ve come too far to turn back, to secrets that explode (or, maybe, fizzle) out, to inevitable betrayals, to even more inevitable conflict with and pursuit by the authorities. Some of it feels narratively contrived, in the “Writing Prompt #5: Somebody walks into a room with a gun” style, but because the characters feel so real and our focus is on them and their reactions to events, it all manages to work.
Even the central story-telling conceit — having it be an epistolary novel, made up of letters and emails and blog entries and voice recordings and text messages — feels like a clever artifice, while actually letting us see more clearly how the characters are actually feeling (or are willing to share in how they are feeling), a verisimilitude that simple bouncing back and forth between 1st person PoVs wouldn’t provide. Eventually it becomes part of the novel itself: providing a sense of the chaotic, creating hints of stuff we can’t see and want to, and, eventually, setting up the question of why all this material is being gathered and what will happen to it, providing an unexpectedly (and almost, but not quite, too) neat frame around the entire picture.
Is it a book I would recommend to someone dealing with suicide, either considering it for themselves or facing the death of a loved one? That’s a question I don’t know the answer to, but I can definitely see the argument for it, as it promotes the clarity of consideration that might be of tremendous help — as well as that hotline number.
Great book. It’s not one I’m going to just casually pick up and read any time soon — but it’s a book I suspect I will, with consideration, pick up again.
This was a really tough novel to read- it was funny but also upsettingly sad, while at the same time contrived with the typical “Straczynski gets on a soapbox rants” where he uses characters as a mouthpiece for whatever issue he wants to pat himself on the back about. The best comparison I can make is that it reminded me of the movie “Life” with Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, a “comedy” where the two of them are sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit in the racist South. It’s not a laugh out loud Klumps movie, but it isn’t a straight drama either. Like the book, it’s punctuated with ridiculous one-liners in a setting that’s inappropriate yet played straight, so it never really presses the more disturbing aspects in lieu of a comedic tone, nor addresses the real issues it hints at.
Straczynski gets so caught up in how clever he thinks his jokes are that he never debates whether what they’re doing is really insane and wrong. If he’s not doing that, he’s trying to give it a false sense of “this could happen” with all the legal mumbo jumbo, when the situation is so ridiculous and contrived to begin with. I would’ve rather seen him address the darker aspects instead of making every situation that drove the characters to suicide so comically, absurdly awful, that it seems like their only option. It’s (like “Life”) a book without a clear message- he doesn’t seem to think suicide is wrong, so what is he saying, it’s great these people were so miserable, or they never would’ve found each other in the first place? That suicide has its plusses? Or they had to die, but call this hotline number since anyone reading isn’t as far gone as he implied every single character was? Straczynski simply chooses to not address these questions as he doesn’t want his confusing authorial intent challenged, so you have to buy into the headspace he’s in or not at all. The real suicide was the friends we made along the way, I guess, and don’t think about the rest too hard.
Ultimately, I felt he was trying to have his cake and eat it too, with the message at the end of the book that his book was somehow going to save lives because now people can see that they too have gone into suicidal ideation- but his premise is false, because no one can really relate to the ridiculously awful backstories he gave everyone. I just got from it that he wanted to write about something personal to himself, but get patted on the back for tacking a big social issue he doesn’t really solve or dare to come down on one side of, and then mixed it all up into wildly inconsistent tones. I would’ve preferred if he committed to his own position and made it clear the people remaining on the bus were making a terrible mistake, or not glorify the other deaths into such over-the-top honor seppuku that it became near slapstick or parody. Kind of a frustrating read, but well written.
Given his background (see Being Superman), I’m not inclined to question JMS’ takes on suicidal ideation all that much. I do agree that it is, like a lot of his morality plays, carefully crafted to make the points he wants to make, with just enough neatly-crafted plot to bridge those polemical moments. I cut it a bit more slack than you, but I appreciate your sharing your thoughts and feelings on it.