Ten years ago last month, Scott Alexander published the prologue to his online novel Unsong. I’d already been reading Alexander’s now-famous blog SlateStarCodex for a few years at that point, but I didn’t take the time to read his novel. I spend too much time looking at screens already, and besides, I go to the internet for gossip and hot takes, not great literature.
But when it was finally self-published last year, I made sure to pick up a copy. I’m a huge fan of Alexander’s writing and I figured Unsong would at the very least be entertaining.1
The action begins on December 24, 1968 as Apollo 8 orbits the moon for the first time. The astronauts are broadcasting to a billion people:
In the beginning... God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
So for two minutes on Christmas Eve, while a billion people listened, three astronauts read the Book of Genesis from a tiny metal can a hundred miles above the surface of the Moon.
Then, mid-sentence, they crashed into the crystal sphere surrounding the world, because it turned out there were far fewer things in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of in almost anyone’s philosophy.
This beginning tells you three main things about Unsong:
1. It has religious, mystical, kabbalistic themes.
2. It covers those themes in the most quotidian way possible.
3. It will be extremely funny because of the dissonance created by points one and two.
Okay, you probably didn’t laugh out loud at the final paragraph quoted above, but it’s a great example of what Alexander calls microhumor. Again and again the novel undercuts its own importance and descends into bathos. The funniest thing in the world is unintentional bathos2, but the second funniest thing in the world is intentional bathos, and this is Unsong’s primary mode: introduce an insane fact—say, definitive proof of God’s existence—and then catalogue the extremely mundane ways the world responds.3
The novel begins with twenty-two-year-old Aaron Smith-Teller, who sits in a cubicle under fluorescent lights speaking ancient-sounding gobbledygook eight hours a day for minimum wage. Why? Because certain combinations of that gobbledygook are the different Names of God, each of which gives the speaker magical abilities. Alexander explains:
People discovered the first few Names of God through deep understanding of the Torah, through silent prayer and meditation, or even through direct revelation from angels. But American capitalism took one look at prophetic inspiration and decided it lacked a certain ability to be forced upon an army of low-paid interchangeable drones. Thus the modern method: hire people at minimum wage to chant all the words that might be Names of God, and see whether one of them starts glowing with holy light or summoning an angelic host to do their bidding. If so, copyright the Name and make a fortune.
And so we have a book which includes the various Names of God intermingled with sections about cubicles, corporations, and copyright law.
The real action begins when Aaron stumbles upon a name which can bestow a soul upon inanimate objects. This matters because only someone with a soul can discover a Name of God by speaking it. Consequently, if Aaron can grant a soul to a computer, it can run through every possible name in no time, and he will become the most powerful person on Earth. Of course, the novel is more than six hundred pages long, so it’s no spoiler to say things don’t proceed smoothly.
In addition to the Names of God, Unsong is about kabbalah. To be honest, before reading this book the only thing I knew about kabbalah was that it was an arcane Jewish practice made famous by association with Madonna.4 Alexander explains the practice early one while Aaron is sitting in his cubicle:
The timer on my computer said I had four minutes, thirty-three seconds left in the workday. 4:33 was the length and name of John Cage’s famous silent musical piece. That makes 273 seconds in all, and -273 is absolute zero in Celsius. Cage’s piece is perfect silence; absolute zero is perfect stillness. In the year 273 AD, the two consuls of Rome were Tacitus and Placidianus; tacitus is Latin for “silence” and placidianus is Latin for “stillness.” 273 is also the gematria of the Greek word eremon, which means “silent” or “still.” None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
God made Man in His own image, but He created everything else in His own image too. By learning the structure of one entity, like the Celsius scale, we learn facts that carry over to other structures, like the Greek language, or the moral law, or my workday. This is the kabbalah. The rest is just commentary. Very, very difficult commentary, written in Martian, waiting to devour the unwary.
I understand that this could feel weird for the sake of weird.
In the hands of a lesser author, this conceit, this level of high-concept, might annoy me.
But in the hands of Scott Alexander, it’s delightful.
Many of us have had the experience of reading a book we don’t like—probably one assigned at school—and having to analyze the symbols and themes. (A daisy is white on the outside but yellow on the inside! White = innocence and yellow = corruption! Daisy from The Great Gatsby looks innocent but is actually corrupt! Literature!!!) I hate this forced, artificial symbolism. But in Unsong that’s just the way the world works. Everything is connected; you just have to see how. This means puns, etymologies, names, historical facts, Bible verses, and coincidences are all fair game in making meaning. I’ve never read a book that made explicit the implicit promise of rewarding close-reading like this.
Many chapters begin with something like the 4:33 rumination above. Here’s one more example, just for fun:
Sitting in bed with her computer on her lap, Valeria Lowry was watching the sun rise and writing the news.
The overt meaning of news is “new things.”
The kabbalistic meaning of news is “the record of how the world undoes human ambitions.”
This we derive by notarikon, interpreting “news” as an acronym for the four cardinal points: north, east, west, and south. There is a second notarikon of the same form. In Greek, the four cardinal points are arktos (north), dysis (west), anatole (east), and mesembria (south). When God took dust from the four corners of the world to make the first man, He named him after those four corners in notarikon; thus, “Adam.”
Despite this similarity, the two words have a difference; news goes n-e-w-s and Adam, converted to the English equivalents, goes n-w-e-s. The middle two letters are reversed. Why?
(When I was explaining this to [my friend] Ana, I added that there was a third word in this class, that being “snew.” When she asked “What’s snew?” I said, “Not much! What’s snew with you?” and she refused to speak to me for the rest of the day.)
I offer the following explanation for the variation. During the day, the sun goes from east to west. This sunrise-sunset cycle represents the natural course of the world, the movement from birth to death. Adam is the only one in history who reversed that pattern; he went from dead clay to living man. And his descendants continue upon that road, trying to reverse nature, to wrest a bubble of order out of the general decay. They raise children, build cities, unify empires. But nature always has the last word. Children grow old and die. Cities fall. Empire crumble. The works of man succumb to the natural cycle. The west-east movement reverses itself, and the east-west course of the sun and the world takes over. And when it does, we call it news.
And so: Valerie Lowry was watching the sun rise and writing the news.
I imagine Alexander had a blast coming up with these connections, especially since, when something doesn’t work (“news” isn’t spelled “nwes”), he has to get more creative to find meaning. There’s a lot of this in Unsong, and I never once got tired of it.
Which leads to another point: because everything is connected in one way or another, the fight scenes and battle scenes are incredibly satisfying. The problem with magic in fiction is always this: the author either doesn’t explain how the magic works, in which case it seems random, or the author does explain how the magic works, in which case it seems non-magical.5
In Unsong, because the magic is performed through kabbalistic connections, it avoids the pitfalls of either extreme: there’s rhyme and reason to it, but not to the point of being completely explicable. You get the sense that, if you understood every human language, had the Bible memorized, and knew all historical facts, you too could engage in magic.
Unsong is a long, complex novel which covers dozens of characters in dozens of different times and places, and it’s a testament to Alexander’s writing that you never once lose track of who’s who or what’s happening: the characters are too well-sketched, the plot too interesting, the book too entertaining. Here are only some of the things this review hasn’t covered:
● Angels who descend to Earth, become very depressed, and spend all day getting drunk on holy water.
● A living computer which takes on the form of Sarah Michelle Gellar.
● The most disturbing version of Hell I have ever encountered.
● The most satisfying apologia for the problem of pain I’ve ever encountered.
● A kabbalistic reading of “American Pie” by Don McLean.
● A rabbi who brings the Statue of Liberty to life to fight a horde of demons.
● Richard Nixon playing the piano.
● The Goddess of Fame cosplaying as Ronald Reagan cosplaying as a cowboy.
● An evil ziggurat.
● A very funny pun about an evil ziggurat.
The amazing thing is none of this feels like blown-out weird maximalism: it’s all connected in a sensible way and nothing seems extraneous. It’s a crime not to mention more about Sohu, her father the Comet King, or her best friend, the math-obsessed, autistic, archangel Uriel6, but I suppose I should leave some surprises for anyone who wants to read this book.
And you should read this book! No book has made me laugh more than Unsong, and its humor isn’t even the only thing going for it.
If you’d like to check out his fiction without committing to an entire novel, I suggest starting with a story about magic pills.
I am begging you to click that link.
Thus the title, which stands for “The United Nations Subcommittee On the Names of God.” I’m guessing it’s “subcommittee” rather than “committee” for the purposes of the acronym, but even that detail is funny to me.
The “Like a Virgin” one, not the “actually a Virgin” one.
In this first case, think of Harry Potter. Listen, I like the “leviosa” scene as much as anyone else, but if your magic is just saying a bunch of words, then whenever there’s a showdown the good guy wins by, like, shouting his curses with more feeling than the bad guy. For the second case, think of any modern Tolkien-wannabe who thinks world-building is fantasy’s most important facet. That author will explain the magical system so completely it may as well be Newtonian physics. But magic can’t be deterministic if it’s going to read as magical!
My favorite character in the book, to be honest.
 | A guest post by
|
Interested in this review. A few people have recommended Scott’s novel to me, but it’s always seemed like a tricky concept and I’ve wondered if it could really pay off.
OK, you got me! I just ordered it. Twenty-one bucks on the evil Amazon BTW. 600 pages for twenty-one bucks fer god sakes. Jody T, c'mon in, what's one more book?