The profundity and subtlety of recent futuristic dystopian literature creates a standard that is hard to match. After Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, any prophetic vision runs the risk of appearing derivative. Tama Janowitz rises to the challenge by injecting her bleak portrait of a future America with flippant humour, her message elevated by absurdity as she wilfully veers into the parodic. The result is funny but flimsy.
They Is Us is the story of one broken family semi-surviving in an imploding world of pollution, genetic engineering, technology and uncontrolled commercialisation. Murielle, mother of two, has just dumped her second husband Slawa, all beer belly and high heels. Her younger daughter Julie takes a summer job at an animal laboratory where genetically modified hybrids are created and used for research. Pink- and blue-feathered rabbits, fist-size flies and masturbating pigs with human organs who "plead with their terrible saucer eyes" suffer in their cages or die slowly in refuse bins, and Julie is unable to resist rescuing the discarded mutants to hide them in her basement.
Home is in a suburban ghetto of chemicals and radioactive substances beside a petrochemical swamp. While the hoi polloi suffers in this toxic pit, the rich minority live in a kind of gated community sealed from pollution. Houses feature entertainment on floor-to-ceiling hologramovisions; postal systems no longer exist; sanitising gelatin gushes out of taps; and "piles of meat cells are coaxed into reproducing themselves until they have formed vast living slabs". Cliche tangles with bursts of originality to form a cinematic mishmash that is entertaining in the short term but flags at novel length.
Julie's boss catches sight of Murielle's elder daughter Tahnee, a blank-eyed beauty, and, with more than a nod at Humbert Humbert, devises a plan to court the mother to get the underaged girl into bed. Julie, disturbed by a plane crash she may have caused, is slowly falling apart, her family oblivious.
This is a brittle, imaginative, glittering farce that never delves beneath its showy surface. As a tale of dysfunctional American family life, it is interesting in itself, and, at its best, it contains touches of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. But for all its deadpan humour and ingenuity, the novel reeks of the tricksy, with the insertion of tiny photos, poems and different typefaces among its experiments. Janowitz's relentless "zany old me" approach seems unnecessary and dated. They Is Us is published as a signed, limited-edition hardback run of 1,000 copies, with a paperback to follow later in the year - and this contributes to the sense of contrivance.
One approaches Janowitz warily, and perhaps unfairly, as an author in a time-warp, her 1986 Slaves of New York by far her best-known work. She has moved beyond these temporal metropolitan concerns and, for all its flaws, They Is Us shows a witty and sometimes brilliant mind at work. It would be far better as a novella - as a tight depiction that would save it from becoming as sterile and shapeless as the world it describes. As admirable as it is silly, this is a gorgeously decorated void.
Joanna Briscoe's novel Sleep with Me is published by Bloomsbury.
