It’s human nature to want to know what’s the point of something. What does it mean, where’s it going, why does it exist? This happens a lot when reading books; you try to figure out where the plot’s taking you, what’s the message in the end.
Sometimes that’ll just frustrate you. Certainly it did for me in Jeffrey Rotter’s book The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering. I kept trying to guess the end point, to figure out where the story was going.
You’ll have more fun if you decide it’s not really going anywhere, and just enjoy the scenery.
The book takes place in a distant-but-not-that-distant future. It’s never made clear what nudged the world into ruin, but it didn’t happen all that long ago; no one alive can remember when things were good, but you can still find canned goods and abandoned libraries if you look hard enough. You’ll hear people talking about the old Floridayans, or living in Miamy, or swimming in the Mexy Gulf, or working in Caroline, or traveling all the way up to Canaday, and you know it hasn’t been too long since the old place names were forgotten.
Two large corporations (Bosom and Consolidated) provide most of the work, most of it back-breaking but honest. Spas and communities for the very rich exist here and there, but everybody else scrapes together a living as best they can; if you live in a good high-rise the stair-people might be weak enough to only shake you down for your pocket money, and very rarely kill anybody.
The book is told from the point of view of Rowan, though it takes you a while to learn his name. He tends to disappear around his twin brother Faron, and is content being the quieter, more cowardly of the two. Their family has it rough, but most people on the planet have it rough, and they’re doing better than average. Their father is decent enough, but a hair-trigger temper has put him in prison a few times. Their mother is quiet, happy in her way, though she carries around a leather satchel with glass bottles and straps and needles, and that’s important to the story later.
Several bad choices put them at the mercy of Terry Nguyen; a corporate man, but one with a dream. An old rocket was discovered beneath Cannibal, and the ancient Astronomers left behind instructions. A lot of instructions. Everything from getting the computers going to training people in hydroponics to mapping out the so-called “stars” that everyone else calls the flaws in the Night Glass.
Whatever happened to the world, Astronomers and Scientists are now considered fairy tales, a step below Jesus Lovers (who are also considered faintly ridiculous, if harmless.) The Night Glass covers the world; the pinpoints in it are cracks that will one day let the poisonous ether through and kill us all, but they’re certainly not anything you could travel to. You’d break your fool head on the Glass, and serves you right for believing such nonsense.
But Nguyen has a plan. He believes in the Astronomers, who saved enough of their knowledge for a future where they’d be respected again. He wants to send astronauts to Jupiter’s moon Europa, and he’s got a family of criminals with two options left: fly into the Night Glass, or work in the sugarcane fields of the Cuba Pens for the rest of their lives.
And here’s where you just have to enjoy the ride. Because the story wanders. It goes back and forth in time, it seemingly skips over really important milestones, but does come back to them eventually. It introduces you to some people that are vital to the plot, and other people that you’ll see for a few pages and then never again, and you can’t predict who’s who. Some things turn out for the best, but other things seem terribly unfair, and some are pretty ambiguous. There’s no climactic point. There’s a few pretty important scenes, but the resolution at the end is less like a dramatic storm, and more like the tide going out.
But if you pay attention to the details, it’s fun. Rowan travels all over the country at one point, and runs into everyone from destitute drug users, to cooks who are generous with mustard packets, to wilderness philosophers. He’s paid in money, or food, or cans of Fanta soda. He goes through withdrawal in a tent, and lives in the last Astronomical Observatory in the world. He tries to control his life, but he’s really content to be led around by people who have bigger plans than he does.
So it’s hard to figure out the point of the book, what meaning the author’s trying to get across. Is it that all knowledge is worth having, or does too much send us off into the apocalypse? Is the study of astronomy something that lifts us out of the dirt, or is it just a plaything of people who are too rich to have to work in the dirt? Is family what supports us, or breaks us?
There aren’t any answers, because this isn’t that kind of book. It’s frustrating, but fun in its way; if you figure there’s no set destination, the journey itself becomes the point. Which is true for a lot of things.