Half Life by Shelley Jackson

I just finished reading Half Life, by Shelley Jackson. This was definitely one of those back of the Barnes & Noble bargains that I bought for the cool cover. I can admit that. I cannot admit how long it took me to read this book. Suffice it to say that other books were red concurrently, or I would be completely off my goal of a book a week. Sadly, despite how much I really did not enjoy most of this book, I kept reading, because I had invested so many hours into it by the time I started thinking about shelving it. I found, for the first time, that I had read a book that I could not recommend to anyone I knew, despite the varied interests of my friends and family.

Shelly Jackson is apparently one of those people who is good at many things – art, writing, electronic literature, even creating a novel called Skin, published in tattoos on the skin of more than two thousand volunteers. Ok, really, I should have read all of this on the back cover before I started reading. Instead, I was duped by the short quote front and center on the book, “Truly Glorious” from the New York Times Book Review. Unfortunately for me, they did not include the entire quote, which apparently praised Jackson's ambition as "truly glorious," but also added that "All this razzle-dazzle, all the allusions, [and] the narrative loop-de-loops [get] a bit busy.” I think they may have been a tad gentle, even in that. Jackson describes herself as a "student in the art of digression", and honestly, she is not kidding. There are so many digressions here that when the story actually picks up you find yourself saying, oh, yeah, that’s what this was about.

In any case, the title of the story is only a small clue about what’s to come, but it is a clever one. Since the scientific meaning of half life is the amount of time a substance undergoing decay takes to decrease by half (thanks Mrs. McGurty’s seventh grade science, and Wikipedia for the refresher), it is an interesting twist that the novel is actually about a Siamese twin who would like to get rid of her extra head. Yes, I know you are probably saying, why did you ever pick up this book? And you would be right. The actual premise is that the atomic bomb caused a genetic mutation that resulted in a significant amount of conjoined twin births – so much so that as Nora grows up she and Blanche are almost in the majority. There are different groups pro and con the “decapitation” she is trying to undergo, and the whole thing just gets crazier from there.

I felt, while reading this, that the author got way too involved in her own little world when she was writing this. Kind of reminded me of all those people who actually speak the language Tolkien created for Lord of the Rings. Despite all this, there were glimpses of a great mind, and a great writer, at work. Her observations were often thought-provoking and sometimes amazing, but there is just too much going on here for me.