Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I would have hated this series when I was younger, too much writing, not enough resolution and revelation. Now that I am ancient of days (early forties) I enjoyed it a great deal.
Look, at some point you realize some stories are plot-driven, full of mysteries where the deepest satisfaction lies in the resolution. In the confirmation that what is happening is knowable and the satisfaction of mapping it all out.
Other stories are meant to be experiential, where the satisfaction lies not in the mapping or the knowing but the transcendent experience of the inexplicable. These stories may purposely thwart knowing, not to spite you, but to shift your attention to the experience of not-knowing or understanding and the joys that may be found there. It's a kind of transcendence edging, for better or for worse. Hanging on the cusp of revelation, tasting it on the tip of your tongue, feeling it in the tips of your fingers, but never quite getting there.
We've all experienced stories with a dissatisfying resolution. Sometimes it comes from a poorly crafted story or characters. Some writers are good at crafting questions but poor at answering them. Some answers are disappointing because they turn the mystery mundane. It was just Old Man Higgins in a suit and the Force is really just micro-organisms in the right concentration. Transcendent fiction eschews the concept of answering them entirely, focusing instead on that wonderful sense of excitement that comes from not knowing, chewing endlessly on the tantalizing hints provided. Answer fiction is order and materialism and experiential fiction is spiritual mysticism. Neither is superior, they are just addressing different needs in different readers.
Southern Reach is a trilogy that falls squarely into experiential fiction, much more David Lynch than not. The entire point of the series is the experience of encountering life or intelligence or something so alien and so different from human experience that interacting it with it leaves you less human than when you started. Of how maddening it is to attempt to rationally understand something which will forever defy the scientific progress of your understanding because you don't have the context or tools or senses to render it explicable. That, at best, it must first be understood irrationally, and that in that process you will be irrevocably altered. It is quantum slit experiment, except that the observation changes, and possibly mutates, the observer.
It's not that answers aren't supplied. By the end of the series you understand where area X comes from and the vague outlines of what it is, but not what it might think or want. What it might think or want is not the point. The psychological and body horror of being changed by something just by interacting with it at all is. You get full character arcs and resolution. It may not be the resolution you are hoping for for them, but their arcs are tangible and, to me, satisfying.
A lot of this kind of experiential fiction depends on the artistry of the author. Lynch is not popular because he gives satisfying answers; he is popular because he excels at filming sequences that feel like dream sequences or being on psychotropic drugs. Likewise, Southern Reach fails or succeeds on the quality of Vandermeer's prose, which is high. I came for the weird story, but I stayed for the evocative writing and compelling characterizations.
Do I recommend this series? Absolutely. So long as you're into more the experience of psychological and body horror resulting from contact with the alien and not hoping too much for a rational mapping and understanding of everything that's happening. That's not the point and it's not a bad thing.
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