The Heap

The Heap is a bad J.G. Ballard pastiche, with a few bare scintillas of charm.

The story is set in the ruins of Los Verticales, an experimental tower city somewhere in the high desert which collapsed. Now the rubble is picked over by diggers, scavenging valuable items from the rubble. Somewhere inside the wreckage is radio DJ Bernard, miraculously alive and giving focus to the digging effort, especially his brother Orville, who is nominally the main character.

The best bits of the story are the interludes titled “The Later Years”, sociological remembrances of the vast apartment complex written in the second person plural: We used to…, exploring a divided society of outer who had a window and inners who didn’t, oppressive social conformity, covert sex in garages, and the meaningless forms of democratic participation under capitalism.

These are not gems, they barely rise to broken glass, but they’re at least shiny. The mass of the story is an undifferentiated ‘dumb conspiracy’. When Orville refuses to include commercial endorsements in his daily calls with Bernard, he is replaced by a vocal impersonator. It turns out that there is a whole covert guild of vocal impersonators willing to murder to maintain power, and managerially ambitious digger Lydia helps Orville free himself from the grips of the conspiracy, where they find out that Bernard is also a vocal impersonator, and the real brother is long dead. But the Heap and the Dig provides some focus in a world.

I care deeply about J.G. Ballard. He even has an adjective, Ballardian, defined as resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels and stories, esp dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments. Thinking about it, the thing about true Ballardian scifi is its absolute sincerity and commitment. The characters are clearly obsessive madmen, driven to the point of destruction, but their obsessions are treated as eternal are irresistible urges, the escaping of thanatic and erotic energy in a post-industrial post-modern space age atomic complex. Ballard’s subject is alienation, and his alienation is richly textured.

By comparison, Adams is nothing but sidelong winks at absurdity. Look at how stupid American managerialism is. Look at the pointlessness of office life, of the tiny rituals we call community, at the cleverness of the decently distanced allusions to 9/11 and Ground Zero. Aren’t I clever as an author? And with all these cleverness, he cores out the strength of the Ballardian project.

I understood entirely when I got to the end and saw in the author’s biography that he attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which I can only conclude is an entire dojo of authors trained how to write a story wrong on purpose, likely as part of some all encompassing Author’s Conspiracy.

At least the book is short.

Almost finished but realized I didn’t care. I read almost the entire book and didn’t care a lick how it ended. So I moved on.

Neat premise. But not Vonnegut. If you’re going to write this way, you gotta expect the comparisons.

The best feature of this book is that it’s a quick read. I got through it rapidly and moved on to something worthwhile.

A clever examination of social structures and engineering, this piece of speculative fiction offers interesting characters and an even more interesting premise. The authors imagination yields an intriguing world that examines class in a new yet familiar way, while also creating a thrilling narrative arc that will have you rooting for the main characters. A fun and fascinating read.

I think most people will find it enjoyable. I did but was not thrilled with certain plot points. Low-key glad it was short.

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