Tom Strelich

Water Memory (re)acquaints us with Hertell Daggett Jr. who was once a celebrated physicist. A stray bullet to the head, among other circumstances, left him only qualified to manage Li’l Pal Heaven, a forty acre pet cemetery located above a vast system of lava tubes in Bakersfield, California.

Some readers will recall Hank Devereaux Jr., the main character in Richard Russo’s 1997 novel, Straight Man. Is it a coincidence that these two protagonists are both H.D’s and juniors? Perhaps. Back then, Hank Devereaux shined a cynic’s light on the absurdities of our world, but decades have passed and Hank wouldn’t recognize it…wouldn’t be up to the task of explaining it to us. That is, if he were allowed to, which is questionable given that today’s world has rocketed beyond the boundaries of Russo’s satire. No, for today’s task we need Hertell, who is called upon to save civilization, but not after the apocalypse we’re all counting on.

We experience near-future America through Hertell’s eyes. He’s familiar with the America you and I currently inhabit though he willingly departed it in Strelich’s 2017 debut novel, Dog Logic (bit of a spoiler there). Hertell and his people are resurrected (in a sense) roughly a decade into the future. Our political system has been replaced with an even clumsier, low-res copy. Our lawn mowers have been replaced with robots. And best of all, our collective history has been replaced with, well, nothing.

A rather routine magnetic pole reversal is rapidly eroding humans’ long-term memories. Hertell is exempt from the worldwide reset owing to that traumatic brain injury he suffered decades back. While uniquely qualified to guide humanity through its reset, Hertell isn’t sure he wants the job. Not under the circumstances, which include being a family man, having celebrity thrust upon him, and a congressional subpoena.

With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke, a miracle is just a scientific event we don't understand yet. Strelich artfully winds this theme around Hertell like a cord around a top, then yanks it off and sends him spinning through our silly society, ungracefully but divinely.

Though set in the near-future, Water Memory is suffused with elements that serve to hold up the mirror, showing us how we live in the present. As evidence I humbly submit to you the title of chapter 26: Prosopagnosia. This neurological ailment renders its victims unable to recognize the people they know the best, including themselves.

But please don’t chalk up Strelich’s world as mere satire. Satirical? Yes, you will laugh out loud. Pure satire? No. Water Memory is much richer and purer that that. Strelich has concocted a familiar semi-sci-fi setting with industrious, damaged, absorbing inhabitants who have a dazzling, terrifying gift thrust upon them: The chance to start over.… (altro)

Dog logic; it makes sense

Some stories remind us not to take ourselves too seriously, to curb our hubris; perhaps remind us how invidious we can be. ‘Dog logic’ is dystopian, sort of, a book about a man, Hertell, wounded by the now (wits scrambled, wife left, career in ruins) and out of sorts. He is a keeper of a pet cemetery. A burier of dogs and cats. A friend to a man he calls Mister Frostie, who is, we later discover, one of the hidden. Hertell has recovered from a strange accident, struck down with memories of all time engineered via fragments of a bullet still stuck in his brain… and hearing things. Real things, it turns out. What he hears is a hidden time capsule: hundreds of people encapsulated against the coming nuclear Armageddon during the Kennedy era. Perhaps Hertell befriends them because he is out of time too. Hertell frees them, maybe, brings them to the surface, like a dog recovering some cherished bone.

This offers a writer of skill – and Tom Strelich is a writer of skill – a host of opportunities for commentary on the times in which we live, on the regulations (both political/legal and customary) by which we live those times, on what might just be wrong with us. Though I wish he was not quite so Randian in his contempt for a stylised evil government (and a host of government agencies who have contemptible agendas) much of what Strelich says about our consumerism, our selfishness, our lack[s – of faith, of belief, of honesty] rings true. Through an increasingly bizarre series of government interventions, then acts of hostility, we feel the horror of these 1960s refugees, a group that had “been totally forgotten since that time … buried in the electronic equivalent of the cavernous Government warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones.” They are a naïve group, Hertell thinks, with their faith in old fashioned virtues, in God, in government, in dogs. Our world (or at least the US government) ultimately rejects them. Perhaps because this hidden people has rejected us; the present, the wretchedly bereft of even dog logic. Strelich writes that these hidden peoples' sensibility is that our current world is filled with people not “thinking much of anything at all, they were just kind of living, just like [Hertell]. He thought of a story that Bobby from FarmFuel told him about how you could put a frog in a pot of water and slowly bring it to a boil, so slow that the frog wouldn’t even notice that it was cooking.”

And though I think that Strelich, like Hertell, is “cynical” (not quite so literally as Hertell who “had the ability to smell such things, just like those sharks that can smell a blood drop on a Band-Aid from a hundred miles away”) about government – something I as an Australian and lacking the current American skepticism about the administration, may not feel is such a threat – I can still admire this book, with its wit, its connections to nature and its inventive joy. Might we indeed be frogs put on to a slow boil?… (altro)