Infinite Zombies

When I finished Bubblegum the other day, I closed up my Kindle case and just sat there. My husband looked up five or ten minutes later and asked if I was OK, and I told him I didn’t really know. I was still trying to figure out how I felt.

I’m still working through my thoughts and feelings on the book. There’s a lot to process, and I think some parts of it are deliberately in tension with some others; I didn’t expect a neat resolution, so that’s not really a surprise, but it is surprising to me how refractory it is. It leads you in directions and then ditches you just before you arrive at an identifiable place, so you end up with emotional responses cued and no concrete framework to process them in.

Paul said he feels like this book is part one of something bigger, and I feel that feel, bruh. Only to me it’s more like, say, parts one, two, four, seven through nine, and twelve of something bigger. We get a lot of setups that aren’t followed through on, and it’s hard to say why I think that is.

For instance: Gender identity gets activated as a site of at least some salience. Paul caught the references to the Wachowski sisters—and as a matter of fact, in our world Lilly didn’t even come out as trans until 2016, and that was under threat of being outed. In that respect, Bubblegum “does well,” if you see what I mean by such a stupid term. But then the same book uses Fondajane to create a social split and actually names one side of that split “anti-beauty/pro–trans beauty.” So why? Why turn those engines on and then walk away with the keys in the ignition? What’s the function of creating an imaginary world where the Wachowskis are apparently uncontroversially women but also choosing to replicate transphobia—and blame it on the one identified intersex character?

Or here’s a big one: Dr. Kleinstadt the vet. Late in the novel we meet a man who has actually been trained to understand cures. He says cures were only even part of the veterinary-school curriculum for a few years in the 90s, which, fine, right? But that means that this knowledge—that cures are even capable of developing cancer, for one huge obvious thing, but also just the understanding, even if only partial, of what cures are and how they work—is available. It’s out there, it was officially taught in courses regulated by state licensing boards. How is this so irrelevant to the book that it comes up in this one episode and is never referred to? Dr. Kleinstadt even looks Blank in the face, for some period of time, and doesn’t apparently feel the urge to slaughter him. It’s been very strongly implied, I’d say, that Belt is (or believes himself to be) special or maybe even unique in his ability to not want to kill Blank. But lookee here, there are others. Whom we won’t spend any time with or on.

Or: After spending the whole book troubled by how people treat cures, Belt decides to use a drug made from spidge without filling us in on any qualms. Was he that altered by his exposure to A Fistful of Fists? It didn’t seem like it. He was concerned enough about Blank to find Dr. Kleinstadt, which was a hassle.

I guess a big part of why I feel so confounded by the book is that I feel like stuff is missing that I need. Like I’ve just spent two months visiting in a house with a lot of rooms locked, and now I’m supposed to figure out how its owners live in it.

There really is a lot in here that I appreciated, not that you’d know it from the emotional reactions I keep having on these pages. Clyde’s admission that he feels like he and Belt are too old to keep playing the roles of father and son is something I wish I saw more of in stories about father-son relationships. Sandrine’s whip-quick connection of No Please Don’t‘s Bam Naka figurine to Lisette seems like it promises to be worth more thought. Obviously pretty much everything about Annie Magnet is gold (except for her fridging). There’s more.

And obviously I wouldn’t have spent two months reading this and feeling as intensely as it made me if it didn’t connect with me. It’s an uneasy connection, for sure, but the book is powerful and I’m glad I got to read it along with everybody here.