DARK MATTERBy Blake Crouch342 pp. Crown. $26.99.In the technical sense of the term, Blake Crouch’s “Dark Matter” is definitely a book. Even the advance galley I just read (in one sitting) was printed on actual paper, with an artfully designed cover and everything. But rather like the mysterious cubelike chamber invented by the physicist Jason Dessen in Crouch’s novel — well, let’s say by at least one version of Jason and perhaps by several; indeed, perhaps by an infinite or incalculable number of Jasons — “Dark Matter” is a portal into other dimensions of reality.Or at least into other dimensions of media. Crouch’s Wayward Pines trilogy became the basis for a Fox television series whose pilot episode was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, possibly because Crouch’s episodic tale about a rural Idaho town that is not what it appears to be was more like a Shyamalan film than anything the director has made in years. “Dark Matter” is surely destined for a similar fate, and as you read it on paper it inhabits a state of quantum transubstantiation, or “superposition,” to use Jason Dessen’s lingo.
It’s a novel right now, one that barely qualifies as beach reading because you’ll gulp it down in one afternoon, or more likely one night. But the next time you look, it will have metamorphosed into some other form.I don’t mean that as disparagement, or mostly I don’t. “Dark Matter” is far too cheerful and indeed too earnest to feel cynical, even as Crouch pilfers material from dozens of sources and Mixmasters together multiple genres of popular fiction. This book is alternate-universe science fiction bolstered by a smidgen of theoretical physics. It’s a countdown thriller in which the hero must accomplish an impossible task in constrained circumstances to save his family. Under deeper cover, it might also be a fantasy novel shaped by C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” or Lev Grossman’s postmodern “Magicians” series. Book Review Newsletter Sign up to receive a preview of each Sunday’s Book Review, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
What Crouch really cannot do, although he occasionally makes token efforts, is slow down the pace enough to allow his characters and readers to take stock of their situation and ponder the meaning of it all. There’s nothing approaching a “Council of Elrond” episode in Jason Dessen’s thicket of multiple-universe paradoxes, and such explication as we get generally arrives in the plot interstices between moments when Jason watches someone he loves get shot in the head, or faces death by freezing and starvation in a post-apocalyptic Chicago, or fends off wolves in a version of North America that has reverted to wilderness. Or finds himself in a world alarmingly similar to his own but not quite identical — where the neighborhood motel has been converted to luxury apartments, the corner bar has gone upscale, and his wife and son don’t recognize him, or don’t exist. That limitation is quite likely all to the good, because if we weren’t being thrust relentlessly forward in Jason’s quest to figure out why he was kidnapped by a familiar-seeming stranger in the middle of the night, injected with powerful narcotics and catapulted, like Howard the Duck, into a world he never made, we might notice how familiar it all is.
Despite the light dusting of pop physics — specifically, the “many worlds” version of multiverse theory, in which virtually every choice made by every sentient being engenders a new universe — Crouch is effectively repurposing and joining two well-worn channels of fictional speculation. There’s the idea of another universe as an inverted or ironic reflection of ours, as in the movie “Sliding Doors” or the “Star Trek” episode featuring an evil, bearded Spock or the Philip K. Dick classic “The Man in the High Castle.” And then there’s the literary conceit, going back at least as far as Poe and Dostoyevsky and Henry James, that throughout our lives we remain haunted by what we might have been, by the ghosts of people we never became.What if those other selves could get through the microscopic membrane separating their universes from ours? What if they liked our lives better and decided to move in? (Which is kind of what happens in that “Star Trek” episode, come to think of it.)
Crouch carries the logical conundrums created by such game-theory hypotheticals to an intentionally ludicrous extreme, culminating in an online chat room where dozens of Jason Dessens argue and feud and forge alliances against one another. As I have suggested, restraint and philosophical reflection are not Crouch’s strong suits, and anyway I shouldn’t give away more of the story than I have already. When the Jason who is a modestly successful and somewhat happily married physics professor at a small Chicagoland college is traumatically translated into Jason the prizewinning scientific superstar at work on a zillion-dollar secret project to alter space and time, he can’t avoid the central question of who the real Jason is, and how he can possibly tell. The fact that Crouch barely pretends to answer this — the Jason with a wife and kid who narrates the story is the “real” one, of course! — won’t slow you down much as you plow through “Dark Matter.” But higher-order speculation about the nature of identity amid the quantum science of uncertainty is by no means new to science fiction, and I couldn’t help reflecting on the various ways genre masters less concerned with forward momentum — Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, Peter F. Hamilton — have tangled with such things.
Sometimes the tactics Crouch uses to keep you reading are delightfully obvious: He has mastered the use of one-word sentences, one-sentence paragraphs and dramatic oceans of white space that allow your eyes to surf down the page. One paragraph reads, in its entirety, “Popcorn.” (The one before that, inevitably, is “Roasted peanuts.”) An account of a character angrily leaving a room takes 21 words, sliced into five paragraphs. Crouch has also studied at the Stephen King School of Information Management, which teaches that the reader and protagonist must be in a state of constant overlap and flux in terms of what they know about the plot, and dictates that whenever one gets too far ahead of the other, she or he will be blindsided by an unexpected revelation or an unobserved detail.On the other hand, Crouch’s obsessive need for speed sometimes leads him to tread upon his better writing and his more imaginative ideas. Much of his scene-setting is strictly thrillerism: an abandoned building in an industrial zone on the shore of Lake Michigan, a luxuriously appointed apartment, a secret high-tech facility many floors underground.
But when Jason finds himself in a film-noir universe where a neon sign sputters in the rain outside a hotel-room window while a shadowy stranger watches from behind a lit cigarette, or in an especially nightmarish technological upgrade of C.S. Lewis’s “Wood Between the Worlds,” I’d have appreciated more expansiveness and more relish.A more serious flaw, perhaps, is that infinite universes produce a certain moral carelessness, a criticism of popularized multiverse theories that has also been heard in the scientific community. If any number of equally real universes exist in which Hitler worked out his aggressions by playing clockwork video games, why get so upset about the unfortunate outcome of his career in ours? Crouch wants us to believe that Jason is traumatized by seeing his beloved wife die gruesomely, or for that matter seeing human civilization exterminated, but it’s all kind of a blur: That’s only one version of his beloved spouse, and one version of our species. There’s always another door to open, and another page to turn.