Title: The Infinite Future
Author: Tim Wirkus
Publisher: Penguin Press
Year published: 2018
Reviewed by Joshua Whiting
So, there is finally such a thing as a unapologetically postmodern Mormon novel. (I mean other than The Book of Mormon itself, which kind of did polyphonic metafiction almost a century before it was cool.) Maybe contemporary metafiction like this has already been a thing in or around Mormondom and I just didn’t know about it or recognize it as such. Either way, I feel like I missed the bus. I might feel a little bit jealous. (If you, reader of this review, are scoffing at my supposition that this is the first book of its kind in Mormon literature, and you’re thinking “What about title x and what about author y,” please by all means share x, y, and z with me in a comment below. I actually want to be wrong and ignorant about this.)
For me, this book vibes with The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, new wave science fiction authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Moonglow by Michael Chabon, and probably a bunch of other awesome stuff I haven’t read yet. In other words, if someone (or more likely nowadays some algorithm) were to conjure up a theoretical book that would most thoroughly match my reading tastes, interests, and cultural background, the kind of book I could see myself trying to write if I weren’t too lazy and distracted to try to write a book, it would pretty much be this book. It wasn’t perfect, but it exists and it is wonderful and I thoroughly enjoyed it, which should be everything. Changing my rating to a 5, because if I can’t give a 5 to a brilliant book that feels as if it was created just for me, since it isn’t absolutely perfect, how can I have any hope or expectation for it to ever be repeated?