Review: High Life

High Life by Matthew Stokoe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book comes just short of being a depraved masterpiece.

Emphasis on the depraved.

Emphatic emphasis.

This book opens with Jack discovering the body of his wife, intact-looking from a distance but with all its internal organs surgically removed. Oh and, yeah, somebody has masturbated into the empty chest cavity.

After that, it starts to get disturbing.

This is a book that flaunts its sense of the wildest, kinkiest, most depraved acts I can imagine. Most go well beyond what I can imagine. There’s necrophilia, incest, double penetration, felching (I didn’t know what felching was, and now I’m sorry I do), snuff shows, and hardcore fecephilia. There’s a woman at the center of this who, given her great wealth, makes a hobby of performing unnecessary surgery, declaring at one point that removing a person’s kidney is a violation even more titillating than rape.

With both a SPOILER and a TRIGGER warning, that brings me to what may be the most disturbing sentence in the history of literature. “Cutting ‘donors’ open to use their kidneys to wank off with kind of fucked the philanthropic story she’d used to sucker my acceptance of her extracurricular medical activities – the organs wouldn’t be much use to anyone after being stuffed up her…” (and cut scene).

All of that pushes the boundaries of bad taste, and I take pride in having expansive such boundaries. Quite simply, most people should stay away from this. It’s so shocking and potentially offensive that it will turn off the vast majority. That is, if you have any sense this will trouble you, listen to that sense and do not read it.

All that said, though, this is more than just a shock-fest. In fact, it has two significant and intriguing philosophies animating it, and it is genuinely a work of literature, one that uses its adrenaline rush to have us confront real issues of our moment.

The first is that Jack’s deeper infection is his sense that nothing matters other than our media. He watches Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, and he thinks their lives matter while his does not. He’s sharp enough to see they have no more substance than he does, but it’s not substance he’s after. It’s pure ethereality. Life becomes meaningful to him when you’re on TV or in the movies or, to a lesser extent, on billboards.

That vast emptiness hovers over the whole novel, and Stokoe is explicit about what it means. Given his sensibility, Jack has no purpose in life except to aim for public notice. When we step back, that’s a horrifyingly amoral premise; at its ultimate extension – as in Jack’s case – it makes it possible to accept the most brutal, uncaring possibilities of life. It’s a caste system crueler than the most naked capitalism: the more famous get to prey upon the less famous, whether through indenture or prostitution. If you can get on screen, you can get away with anything.

The second philosophical notion is subtler. As I read this, Stokoe implies it and then applies it inconsistently. Still, there’s a perpetual sense that the body itself is somehow innocent. Individuals can be brutalized, humiliated, or perpetrate humiliation, but there’s an implicit forgiveness – or, more modestly, an implicit re-set button. Someone can sell his or her body on the strip one night and then possess a kind of innocence the next.

There’s an old Lenny Bruce observation – not so much funny as philosophical – that there is nothing you can do to the human body that will make it dirty. Toilets can become dirty, he says, but never other humans. With most people regarding Bruce as nothing more than a provocateur, and with even many of his supporters claiming he’s merely finding new avenues for being funny, the impact of that philosophy gets blunted. Still, I think there’s something profoundly moral, maybe even religious in the claim, and I think Stokoe echoes it more intriguingly than anyone I know.

On the one hand, those two concepts speak to each other intriguingly. One speaks to an end of morality as we know it; it raises the notion of a purely visual culture without context. The other offers a glimmer of redemption. We live in our bodies, and there’s a fundamental decency and value to that possibility. There’s commodity value, but it’s also something more, something in the possibility each separate day has to offer.

On the other, those two concepts collide, fascinatingly, in Bella’s perverse sexuality. In its milder form, she gets off by conducting her illegal surgeries in limited fashion. She takes just a kidney, pays her “donors” $30k, and lets them return to the world. That raises the powerful question – powerful within the range of philosophies governing the novel – whether she has changed them. They are restored to the same possibilities as before, heightened even in that they now have money that can buy them a higher profile. (One donor buys a distinctive Egyptian-themed bar and becomes a ‘somebody’ as a consequence of selling his kidney.) They are also, however, different bodies. Even if they function the same (and, SPOILER, Jack’s one-time friend Rex cannot, which costs him his life) they bear a shocking scar. They’ve lost something they can’t name. They’ve been violated in a way that future success – future fame or future money – cannot cover over.

At that level, and at that point, I really do think this is a masterpiece. There’s something horrifying and perhaps titillating in all that, but there’s also something original and brave: in a world whose amorality is spun from exaggerations of our contemporary excesses, what are the limits of what one person can do to another. That’s an old question asked in new terminology, and I think it’s what the best literature sets out to do.

All that said, I think Stokoe blinks at the end. I think, SPOILER, it diminishes the philosophical interrogation to have Ryan – the wonderfully amoral and corrupt cop who’s been forcing much of the investigation Jack’s pursuing into his wife Karen’s murder – turn out to be Karen’s father. When he enters, he seems the embodiment of this new potential morality. He’ll abuse anyone, even his own daughter, sexually, but he seems genuinely offended by the surgical nature of Karen’s murder. He seems happy to exercise his perversion, to humiliate one after another of the people he comes across, but he seems to draw the line at preserving the human body.

For me, the novel takes a step backward when Ryan gloatingly takes Jack to a club where they perform public snuff shows. (The victim is jack-hammered in a kind of symbolic fucking.) It’s brutal, but so is the rest of the novel. It rings wrong in that scene, though, to have Ryan so unmoved by death and disfigurement. If, instead of being motivated by the coincidence of his being Karen’s father, he were motivated by an adherence to an odd code – to a code that views the body as somehow valuable in a world that values nothing else – I think this would be more consistent with the premises it supplies early on.

That’s all that keeps me from declaring this extraordinary. It ends with an amoral turn, one that becomes predictable as the hardboiled generic conventions slowly define Bella as a femme fatale, but one that’s still satisfying after all we’ve seen. (SPOILER: OK, I’ll spill. As Jack descends into the amorality that his involvement with Bella begins, he develops a taste for necrophilia. That can be revolting, but it’s an extreme test case for the concept of whether it’s possible to violate the living body. In the very end, then, when Bella seems to take him back under her wing since he’s the only one alive who knows the nature or her surgical perversions, he kills her in an attempt to save a comparative innocent. As she’s dying, well, I leave the rest to your imagination.)

Again, THIS IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART. Stay far away from this unless you want to be horrified. If you do go in for the horror, though, don’t forget to listen for its insistent and at times movingly radical conversation about the fundamental value of a human life.


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