Hence (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Leithauser asks the reader to imagine that this book is written in the near future (1995) and reprinted in the more distant future (the mid-twenty-first century). Possibly to help readers accept such a premise, the twenty-first century reissue includes an introduction by one Robin Orrin, who asserts that by his time books are an “anachronism.”

The novel’s purported author, a man named Garner Briggs, is the much older brother of the main character, Timothy. In 1993 Garner accompanies the brilliant Timothy, a former junior world chess champion, to a match against ANNDY, a super-fast computer chess program designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The game generates enormous media interest, and Timothy, until now a withdrawn post-adolescent, develops a flair for handling the limelight, with a message to restore Americans’ faith in themselves. Meanwhile his chess-playing, though erratic, exhibits a growing genius that threatens to stump the computer. Yet Timothy cannot hide an inner turmoil that mirrors the disintegrating society around him.

Though told mostly from Garner’s viewpoint, HENCE allows each of the other principal characters at least one chapter of his or her own. (Even the computer has one short wordless meditation, described as a “gathering complexity.”) As a foil to the characters’ intense immediate concerns, the book also hints of a coming environmental crisis--which Orrin, more than fifty years later, looks back on as “the Shift.”

The result is a tension between the shared environment that is running out of control and the inner world of the individual, where no controls can ever reach. In 1993, the year of the novel’s action, Garner and Timothy take a memory-laden walk through their childhood Indiana hometown on a strangely summery November night--the beginnings of the Greenhouse Effect?

Leithauser has also published two well-received volumes of poetry and one previous novel. HENCE is a poetically written novel that promises--and delivers--much in the way of entertainment and instruction.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXV, January 15, 1989, p.835.

Chicago Tribune. February 5, 1989, XIV, p.5.

Kirkus Reviews. LVI, November 15, 1988, p.1631.

Library Journal. CXIV, January, 1989, p.102.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. February 26, 1989, p.2.

The New Republic. CC, May 8, 1989, p.41.

The New York Review of Books. XXXVI, March 30, 1989, p.20.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, January 22, 1989, p.1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIV, October 28, 1988, p.62.

The Washington Post Book World. XIX, January 22, 1989, p.5.