Meredith Westgate's THE SHIMMERING STATE

 Like Paul Scott's classic Raj Quartet of decades past, this novel ought to have started with a thesis sentence that gave us a bit of a warning what was in store for us, like "This is the story of a rape." In Scott's novel, the actual, physical rape of a young woman is meant to illustrate in microcosm what the British had done to India; in Meredith Westgate's debut novel, The Shimmering State, there may or may not have been an actual physical rape, but there is most certainly a rape of a consciousness. The crime occurs after pages and pages depict a powerful older male film producer type -- the story takes place in a near-future Los Angeles -- taking choice after choice away from a young ballerina, Sophie, who is on the brink of making it big but who is still entirely vulnerable to the machinations of guys like him, who can destroy careers with a word -- or psyches with a dose of a hot new club drug that he's been evangelizing through all those same pages that he's been enjoying Sophie's discomfort at his attentions. The threat has loomed large from the very beginning. He's sure she'll enjoy it. Why does she keep saying no? The pressure that mounts is exquisitely awful; we know he's going to slip her a dose, it's just a question of when...

Whether or not he actually got into her pants after dosing her is therefore a moot point. 

Anyway, The Shimmering State is the story of a rape and what happened afterwards.

It's also the story of a young man, Lucien, who has allowed first his famous artist mother to subsume his identity in the usual way - dominating his life, though in a kindly way, and overshadowing his own artistic efforts to the point that even after her death his work is getting included in shows because he's his mother's son - and then lets his grandmother more literally subsume him when he swipes a couple of her experimental new Alzheimer drugs (the same ones used recreationally by the film producer*), meant to revive her mind with somehow curated versions of her own chemically stored memories.

Lucien, I should be clear, is not the rapist.

Sophie and Lucien, we find, knew each other slightly in the before times -- before Lucien started tripping on his grandmother's memories, and before the producer slipped Sophie a mickey composed of a thrill killer's memories -- before meeting again in a rehabilitiation clinic that treats bad cases by more or less stripping all of their memories and then carefully reintroducing only the ones the patients want or need to keep to be functioning, happy humans again. Despite their erasures, Lucien and Sophie feel drawn to each other and experience what might amount to the body remembering what the mind cannot. 

The story of how each of them wound up at the rehab clinic unfolds gradually, interspersed with servings of that of their progress through this weird therapy and a few episodes from the life of the clinic's head, who experiences a personal tragedy in the middle of it all that seems like it might put her at risk of joining her patients. This therapist, one Dr. Angela Sloan, looms toward the novel's end as a monster potentially worse than any villainous psychiatrist since Ursula LeGuine gave us Dr. Haber in The Lathe of Heaven. Her position doesn't quite give her the power to alter reality itself, but the control her position gives her over the most intimate details of her patients' very memories is terrifying even before she succumbs to the temptation to abuse it when someone very close to her, with whom she has made a myriad of mistakes, comes within that power. Her story thus combines elements of both Lucien's and Sophie's and should, perhaps, have been developed more to become a true third narrative rather than a mere occasional commentary on the other two. It is brought mostly to a satisfactory conclusion within the small space it occupies, at least. This may be Westgate's first novel, but she knows better than to leave plot threads dangling.

More importantly, she also knows the art of sharing intense experiences and hard-hitting emotional truths in truly lovely prose. A natural disaster interrupts our characters' progress late in the novel and gets the following terribly vivid description that gives our very homes an air of waiting menace:

What does a mudslide sound like? Movement. But what is silence, untethered? A forest holds a cracking thunder; a hillside neighborhood, its wealth in weght. What are the latent sounds of an area, in stillness, that might be released in motion? Closets of clothing, dressers packed full; giant televeisions made to appear weightless, hovering on steel brackets; cabinets stocked with spices in glass jars; refrigerators full of produce and cold meats. We live in silence that could suffocate us. Crushed under all that we own.

Or this, in which a breakthrough on Sophie's part brings back as much pain as hope:

The memory is so clear, the red Solo cup in her hand, the smell of Casey's house. She knows it is progress to conjure a memory all on her own. But, of course, it's the one that just might break her heart.

Yeah, it broke mine. 

Don't snooze on this book, or this author, friends. There are pitfalls ahead of her and this novel is going to be hard to match or surpass, but if she finds herself up to the task of trying, Meredith Westgate might be a name to keep looking for when finding new things to read for some time to come.

*Your humble blogger being the Gene Wolfe dork she is, of course this drug seems like a 21st century version of the Analeptic derived from the Alzabo in The Book of the New Sun, though at least here there's no need for a dead body or the consumption along with the drug of that dead body's brain.