Suicide Club by Rachel Heng

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 10, 2018

Suicide Club takes the concept of “pro-life” to its logical extreme by imaging a near future in which severe consequences attach to any behavior that might shorten a lifespan: eating red meat, drinking alcohol, listening to jazz, failing to exercise, exercising too much. Americans are genetically assessed at birth. Those who are designated as “lifers” become vegetarians and meditate daily. They avoid stress because cortisol is harmful, but they don’t run because running is bad for the knees.

As long as lifers return a value to society that exceeds the cost of keeping them alive, they are entitled to enhanced skin and tissues and organs, at least until they reach the end of their allotted extended lifespan, when maintenance is withdrawn and the enhancements begin to atrophy, leaving lifers trapped inside a decaying body that does not easily die. Life extension is an instrument of control; Americans who fear death behave as the government wants them to behave, for fear of losing their enhancements.

Why all of this is true is unclear. The concept is interesting, but the political environment that would allocate life extension is not developed. Governments have a tendency to control their populations and to help the powerful retain power, but all of that would happen naturally as a function of wealth, without government-imposed genetic assessments. One of the novel’s weaknesses is its failure to explore the political conditions that would allow the imagined society to exist.

In any event, Anja’s mother has reached the end of her allotted life extension; having lost her health subsidies, she is lying in bed, waiting but unable to die. Anja turns to the Suicide Club for help because, when enhanced skin and muscles are almost impossible to cut, suicide is a challenge. The government opposes the Suicide Club because, with its low birth rates, American supremacy would be challenged if people choose when to die rather than letting the government decide that they are no longer useful. That premise seems doubtful (if population were the key to supremacy, India would be more powerful than the United States), but I rolled with it for the sake of enjoying the novel.

At the age of 100, Lea Kirino still has her original body. Lea’s father Kaito has been gone for 90 years. He’s regarded as an enemy of the state. Lea works for HealthFin and follows all of society’s rules. Believing she sees her father, or perhaps his ghost, she steps into traffic to cross the street and finds herself placed on an Observation List, her Tender having concluded that she tried to commit suicide. The conformist Lea is thus assigned to the Wecovery group, where she meets the subversive Anja. How that will work out is the dynamic that drives the story.

Suicide Club rests upon intriguing themes. Healthy living, at some point, removes the flavor from life (and from food). What’s the point of living a longer life if the joy of living must be sacrificed? Sex can be risky, but it’s also fun. Taken to its extreme, as this novel suggests, healthy living might preclude attending live concerts (although current thinking is that regular attendance at live concerts actually helps people live longer). As the novel points out, notions about what is or is not healthy regularly change and are often contradictory. Still, America’s most repressive traditions have always held that if something feels good, it must be bad for you and should be forbidden.

As is customary in novels, key characters cast off the assumptions that have driven their lives and discover important truths. At the same time, I can’t say that Rachel Heng made me care whether the key characters lived or died. Anja and Lea are both too lifeless to worry about; they might as well be dead already.

There are times when the plot seems forced, as if it is meant to teach lessons rather than to tell a story. Even the subtitle (A Novel about Living) force-feeds the novel’s lessons to the reader. For those reasons, while Suicide Club is interesting and while Rachel Heng’s writing style makes the novel easy to read, the story falls short of being compelling.

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