The End of EcoLit, and the Start of Something New Between Two Men Who Are Both Single (Haha… But What If Tho)
I would like to begin by thanking Simon &The End of EcoLit, and the Start of Something New Between Two Men Who Are Both Single (Haha… But What If Tho)
I would like to begin by thanking Simon & Scheuster for sending me an ARC in exchange for an objective review. I hope to have fulfilled that requirement below. Should any of you worry that my objective review might incur the author's ire, let me assure you I spent a good deal of time Google Image searching "stephen markley shirtless" / "stephen markley beach" / "stephen markley turkish oil wrestling" to size him up for a potential fight. Yes, I imagine things might get physical between us. Though I couldn't find what I was looking for, I emailed his agent for some nude, full-body shots, just in case our manly tussle should prove inconclusive and we have to resort to a dick-measuring contest. His agent has yet to respond.
Anyhow. Markley’s 896-page second novel will no doubt beget comparisons to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Both are written by bicurious, white men, and the novels have similar cover art, grandiose titles, and girth. Such comparisons will quickly fall apart, however. Whereas Infinite Jest strove to be good, The Deluge charts its own path. Before I Virgil you along it, I should note right off the bat that the novel is 2.27” thick and 1.28 pounds, making it profoundly sexist, homophobic, and ableist by gatekeeping all those with weak wrists from reading it. Thankfully, I lift—almost up to 225 on bench, by the way—so I, in a profound act of allyship, will put my rough and calloused hands to use as a sensitive reader. (DM me for my Venmo if you’d like to support my allyship.)
The book opens with a dedication to Markley’s mother—a sure sign that this guy gets no women. From there, we are thrust into a decades-spanning, Sorkinesque political opera about climate change, featuring characters who range politically from corporate “denialists” to left-wing extremists radicalized by incivility on Twitter. This imagined future does feel a little nostalgic at this point, because, as of 2022, climate change is very passé and one struggles to imagine that it will become politically or socially relevant again. (When was the last time you heard about Greta?) Further, this book’s January release is a puzzling decision from the marketing department: Can you think of a time of year when so-called global warming feels less plausible? That said, climate change, as a liberal fiction, befits the imaginary backdrop of a novel, and indeed, I found myself hoping for a mass extinction event in a Malthusian gambit that would leave us with a more manageably sized cast of characters. So, all in all, one can’t fault Markley for taking the easy way out of developing a setting for his sophomore novel.
Leaving aside these liberal hallucinations, I was pleasantly surprised that Markley got to a sex scene in the first 100 pages—an important reward that must be interspersed throughout a novel of this length to rally the reader’s motivation, like when you give your tyrannical, ADHD child a gummy bear for every paragraph of their history textbook they stumble through. The sexual encounter is between a young woman—a failed candidate for Lean In feminism recently jilted both romantically and professionally by men—and a strapping, anonymous actor, whom the reader is left to imagine as a virile and carousing Volodymyr Zelensky in his leather-pants prime. Though the woman ultimately learns that the actor sees her only as a one-night stand, she accompanies him to his lavish apartment where they undress and the woman palpates his toned abs against the backdrop of the Chicago skyline.
Reader, I was hooked! But here, Markley betrays the hapless reader by inserting a flashback that diegetically overwrites the unfolding sex scene. He resumes at the aftermath of the encounter by giving us the excruciating, seemingly unnecessary description of the actor’s semen running from the woman’s vagina to her anus (Markley’s word). Then, one recalls a vulgar joke from a previous chapter where semen runs in the opposite direction, from anus to vagina, and realizes that, though Markley may not have read enough from Literotica or had sufficient practical experience to write a serviceable sex scene, he has certainly studied his Bible, because these intersecting details create a sexual-anatomical chiasmus—the rhetorical form, dear readers, favored by Christ, most notably in the Sermon on the Mount. Subtly chiming with the religious undertones of the book’s title, we are opened up to the first hint that the deluge Markley has in store for us isn’t biblical but seminal.
I assume I’m going to run into a word cap in this review, so allow me to provide my own fast forward. Markley introduces some more characters, gestures toward a plot, and embellishes the novel’s setting and themes. He duly and explicitly checks his own privilege as a white male writer via two of his characters before we get to the end of Book I, and throughout, you get the sense he has put a lot of thought into how writers can #resist Donald Trump. Such self-seriousness—bested only by Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School—belies the novel’s more spritely frolics in perspectival changes and formal experimentation.
Thankfully, in all this excitement Markley does not fall into the trap of EcoLit by meditating on nature or reveling in its beauty through the enchanting power of language, à la Richard Powers. Rather, even as the novel moves between its diverse cast of narrators and through time, it insists that the best way of making people care about nature is through statistics and politics and not, like, trees. “Touch grass” might be a meme tossed around by the homegrown terrorists targeting me on Twitter, but do you know what isn’t a meme? Politics. It’s serious business, and it’s what the novel as an aesthetic form does best.
This is not to say that the novel entirely avoids romanticizing nature. Two college grads have a sexual grapple on a majestic peak in the Tetons (for those curious: male sub, bi female dom; 1.5 red peppers out of 5); years later, another escapade beside a waterfall (zero peppers); and a little after that, in a camper (zero again); and in these scenes, we mournfully recognize that catastrophic climate change would jeopardize the possibility of educated young people having al fresco sex—a fate sadder than a starving panda. (One imagines the liberal commentariat will soon start whipping its base into line by scaring them into believing that the acidification of the oceans will spell the end of woke sex on the beach.) Indeed, one would be forgiven for believing that this book is simply Markley’s sexual obsession for one of his characters, the face of a Warrenite revolution in nonprofits, grassroots activism, and across-the-aisle compromises: a plucky, biracial, bisexual, incredibly horny girlboss with a bad mouth and an irresitable sexual hunger for aspirational writers. But believing this sincerely would risk invalidating Markley’s budding midlife bicuriosity, so we must set this unfair criticism aside.
At any rate, what Markley’s avoidance of nature makes clear is that at stake in climate change is not the health of the planet so much as “humanity”—a vague term that brings with it all sorts of liberal political frameworks. In this way, Markley graciously confirms what the Right has been saying about “climate change” for years: it is simply a cudgel or a trojan horse for a left-wing political agenda. We can’t have climate change politics without intersectionality, but we can have it without bees. Leftists everywhere should be heartened by the news that they can stop rubbing their boners against tree bark! The ploy has worked! They can save the world without having to touch it.
As the book goes on, Congress pares down historic climate legislation; corporate boardrooms go into overtime to stymie activists; and a polyamorous couple breaks up (though one can’t say “predictably” or the cancel police will come)—all while once-in-a-lifetime weather catastrophes become commonplace, famines spread across the planet, and LA, in a stroke of mercy, is burned to the ground, freeing the nation from cultural decline amid its general devastation.
And yet none of this is comparable to the looming dread one feels that the novel is escalating toward some grand statement about literature, climate change, and the future—the seminal emission that has been building up over hundreds of pages. I, for one, feared that someone of Markley’s political acumen and extremism—someone who invested $100 into Jay Inslee’s presidential campaign before tactically pivoting to Liz Warren—would radicalize me with the force of his revelation. But as with the aforementioned sex scene, Markley betrays our expectations, even though our mouths were already agape, awaiting his explosive revelation. Perhaps Markley realized in concluding this novel that he has nothing to say about literature, because he has failed to create it himself. The book is a hodge-podge of liberal policy proposals and interest group rejoinders—sometimes reduced to mere bullet points—embellished with left-wing infighting. It is The Jungle for Vox readers.
Wonkish and chaste, The Deluge awaits a glowing review from The New York Times’s most discerning mind, Dwight Garner, and will no doubt be universally described and fondly remembered as “timely.” I look forward, with relish, to listening to Markley’s interview on Ezra Klein’s podcast. And Steve, if you’re reading this, I have oil and a tarpaulin; I’m ready for you....more
