Review: Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

The last time I left the city was four years ago and the beltway looks just as grim as I remember.  No one’s living here, because everybody had to choose, urban or rural and this place is neither.  Dry, decaying suburbs.  Nothing of value’s left, not even windows.  The thugs who took over the distribution of resources occupy the biggest spaces they can find here and make them into offices, but they live in the bigger houses farther out.  So there’s all those little mansions, all this real estate, empty and worthless — whole houses look gutted, like cars that have been stripped and put up on blocks.  Grandpa says, “Plenty ironic, these suburbanites who want life both ways out here end up losing the most.”  (from Things We Didn’t See Coming; I received a manuscript copy so I don’t have a page number and don’t know whether this passage appears like this in the finished book.)

Things We Didn’t See Coming is a dystopian novel that begins on New Year’s Eve 1999 and follows an unnamed narrator as he navigates life after the grid goes down in a Y2K phenomenon.  Readers first meet the narrator as a teenager, leaving the city for his grandparents’ farm due to his father’s fear that things are going to dramatically change.  As the years pass, in which a government known as “Central” takes over and divides people and resources by urban and rural, the narrator must contend with hunger, floods, relocations, plague, medical and technological advances, and even romance.

Steven Amsterdam has written a social commentary of sorts in Things We Didn’t See Coming.  He touches upon such things suburbanization, the failure of government assistance programs, and the widening gap between the “haves” and “have nots.”  While the narrator’s father defies the title of the book, and even though Y2K was a much talked about concern, most people could not have expected the world to unravel so quickly and completely due to what the narrator’s father calls foolish “interdependence.”

“This whole things is symbolic, symbolic of a system that’s hopelessly short-sighted, a system that twenty, thirty years ago couldn’t image a time when we might be starting a new century.  That’s how limited an animal we are.  Do you get it?  A whole species that didn’t think to set its clocks the right way.  We are arrogant, stupid, we lack humility in the face of centuries and centuries of time before us.  What we call knowledge, what you learn in school about fossils and dinosaurs, it’s all hunches.  What we know now is that we didn’t think enough.  We know we aren’t careful enough and that’s about all we know.  That’s what I’m trying to protect us from.”  (from the manuscript)

However, what could have been a compelling read about the consequences of humanity’s shortsightedness was difficult to enjoy.  Things We Didn’t See Coming had been sitting on my nightstand for months and months, with my bookmark only about five or six pages in, and I told myself I had to give it one more try.  Part of my reluctance to read the book was tied to the fact that I received a manuscript copy that featured notes between the editors (which were interesting but distracting), and it wasn’t bound very well and started to fall apart, so I didn’t want to carry it on the train.  But the book also was a challenge to read because the narrator isn’t named, making it difficult to forge a greater connection with him, and it is written more like a series of related short stories.  Amsterdam tells the story in chronological order, but there are gaps of several years between each chapter, during which the world undergoes some substantial changes.  The few details provided about the narrator’s current living arrangements and occupation and what’s going on in the rest of the world make it difficult to gain more than a surface understanding of the narrator’s experiences.

Even so, I applaud Amsterdam for balancing the darkness and the tragedy with some humor.  He does a good job of showing how the narrator must go against what he believes is right and commit crimes in order to survive, and in that respect, readers likely will be able to connect with the narrator on some level.  I thought some of the tidbits Amsterdam gives about the new society were very interesting; he mentions male infertility, assays that can predict health problems decades into the future, and marriage contracts that are renewed every 18 months.  I just wanted more details and more of a connection to the narrator.  I wanted to feel the fear and uncertainty and chaos.  Maybe some of these issues were eliminated in the final version, but I just didn’t enjoy the book enough to track down a copy and find out.  However, Things We Didn’t See Coming does provide much food for thought and definitely generates questions, so it might make a good book club selection.

Disclosure: I received a copy of Things We Didn’t See Coming from Random House for review purposes. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2011 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.