Of Future Shock and Life’s Eternal Truths

“To begin with, as everybody knows, I’m an arsogenic metamorph. Mother made me one. She wanted a son for an artist.” With this opening line, Hugh Nissenson embarks on an odd, disturbing and unusual novel. The central conceit of “The Song of the Earth” is that it is not a novel at all but rather the faux-biography of John Firth Baker, a “manual artist,” genetically engineered in the year 2037 and murdered in 2057. The story is told through a series of oral history interviews with the people in Baker’s life, including his mother and his various male lovers. Nissenson works overtime on the illusion that this is nonfiction. The book is scattered with headlines from future news Web casts (“Diva to Head American Association of Naturally Gifted Artists: Proclaims Her Voice a Gift From God”), and the text includes footnote references to various works composed in the mid-21st century. It also comes complete with a two-page preface composed by the “author” of the book, a woman named Katherine Jackson writing in the year 2067.

To this mix, Nissenson adds drawings, etchings, woodcuts and even a 13-page color inset of what are supposed to have been Baker’s most famous works, known by his legion of fans as “the Baker’s dozen.” The artwork is Nissenson’s creation, and while his skill as a visual artist may not compare to his talent as an author, the illustrations do add to the sense that we are, indeed, reading about the life of a real person who happened to live 50 years in the future.

The setting is utterly dystopian. Global warming has so altered the planet’s climate that the Midwest is a dune-filled desert, New York is a flooded city with mega-towers perched above canals, and the oceans rise several feet every decade. Many people live in domed, climate-controlled settlements called “keeps.” The planet is riven by an ongoing and intensifying gender war. Baker’s mother, Jeanette, is a suicidal bipolar lesbian who has John Firth Baker via artificial insemination with a geneticist in Japan. She is also a devout “Gynarchist,” a group that believes that men and women (spelled “wimin”) are fighting a battle for control of human (spelled “humin”) destiny.

John Baker, meanwhile, briefly becomes a devoted “Gaian,” a gender-bending cult of unclear beliefs. The formative experience in John Baker’s young life occurs when he breaks with his mother to follow a “Gaian” guru named Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee, a bearded, breasted teacher. Baker turns tricks in New York to fund his art and, in time, Mookerjee becomes his leading patron.

This is a novel without chapter breaks, consisting of hundreds of paragraph-length vignettes written in first person and meant to mimic interview excerpts. It is a story festooned with science-fiction jargon and neologisms about future innovations, broken up by poems, drawings and news bulletins. It contains jarring acts of violence and graphic sex between multiple genders. It suggests that the future will be as disastrous as we fear it might be. And yet, somehow, Nissenson makes the life of John Firth Baker compelling. Beneath a heavy sheen of pessimism, we are left not with the sense that the future is irredeemable, but rather that our collective need to create beauty and find meaning will flourish even in the least propitious circumstances. Toward the end of his life, John Baker writes to a friend, “To tell the truth, I’m glad to be alive. It’s 4:15 p.m. I just looked out my fifty-fifth story window. A sea gull was bobbing in the canal. It drifted up and down on the green water in the violet shadow of the bridge on the corner . . . I have so much to learn. Maybe I’ll make something worthwhile by the time I’m forty.”

These words sound, and are meant to sound, familiar. They evoke the eternal notes of a youth on the verge of adulthood discovering hidden beauty and hoping to add some of his own to the world. Baker may live in a warped world decades to come, but his humanity (or “huminity”) owes nothing to science fiction or futurism. His is an old story, told by Nissenson with lots of bells and whistles, some more successful than others, but told with skill and consistency of voice. That is no mean feat given the multimedia ambitions of his novel. His book will not sing to everybody. There are too many gimmicks, and too much darkness. Still, “The Song of the Earth” does sing, and Nissenson evokes a melody that is at once painful and hopeful.