Review: Replay

Replay by Ken Grimwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I went looking for this book because I’d heard it was essentially the same plot as Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, a book I very much enjoyed. Superficially, that’s true. Both work on the premise that an individual lives his life, dies, and is reborn knowing everything he experienced the previous times around. That’s an obscure plot possibility, so it’s easy to see the connection. I know some reviewers complained that North simply stole Grimwood’s idea.

As it turns out, though, reading this one – which is nearly as good as North’s book – is fun in large part because of its differences. Each book is a reflection of its era. Each takes the same concept and applies it to a different cultural argument. As someone who’s been trained in historical literary criticism, I know that at a theoretical level, but it’s striking to see it play out as it does between these two. In fact, given that both have a lot to offer, I think it would be a good assignment – for a class, maybe, but certainly just for the reading experience – to read them back to back.

North, in her 2014 book, takes the notion of fable comfortably; she takes for granted that different experiences or perceptions sit side by side and determine the reality we experience. That’s axiomatic in an age of “alternative facts.” We’re in the middle of it now, but maybe a couple decades from now it will stand out as striking that so many of us in this moment happily embraced fantasies of one sort or another. How different experientially, after all, is Marvel’s sustained Cinematic Universe, from what it must feel like to accept the narrative our President puts forward; one imagined truth sits upon another until it’s an edifice large enough to walk inside and close the door behind.

Replay is, at bottom, a late 1980s novel rather than one from the 2010s. It’s less trusting of fable, with the result that we get a more sustained push for verisimilitude. In fact, one of the two major ways this falls short of the fun of North’s novel is that this is simply more tedious in its detail. Writing in that moment, Grimwood must have felt called on to make more elements of his work “believable,” with the result that it moves more slowly.

North succeeds by asking us to open ourselves to a staggering new potential view of “the real.” (In fact, her ‘replayers’ could be the basis for a conspiracy theory, and they are actually a group of conspirators who establish vast fortunes and security for one another over the ages.) The real comparison for Grimwood, then, is other writers of his moment, writers who were working in the wake of the disappointment of “flower power” and other 1970s optimisms.

The most obvious point of comparison, then, is Groundhog Day, a fabulous film that’s ultimately about the notion that the universe is benign, that it’s singled out Bill Murray’s character so he has the opportunity to learn what really matters in his life. He relives his one day over and over until he gets it right, until he gets Andi MacDowell and learns to put others before himself.

More effective as a comparison, though, is Forrest Gump. The Winston Groom novel is published in the same year as this one, and – at least by the time it’s a movie – it’s a conservative, cynical farewell to what it sees as the excesses of the 1960s and early 1970s. Jenny goes with every fad, every would-be new age discovery, and she suffers for it. Forrest, too dumb to be distracted, clings to old school ways, valuing the things Groom thinks we’ve forgotten to value, things only a self-centered soul could forget about.

This novel is hardly as cynical and conservative as Forrest Gump, but its biggest departure from The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is in its ultimately acknowledging that we can’t answer life’s deepest questions. The novel explicitly asks what we’re supposed to do with the near-immortality of innumerable “replays” of our life, and it provocatively refuses to provide an answer. Jeff and Pamela don’t really learn anything. [SPOILER] By the end, when they’ve finally moved beyond what was their original deaths, they’ve achieved an innocence they haven’t had since their first lives.

I admire that reticence to be meaningful, and I there’s a great openness in Grimwood’s insistence that we simply have to be open to life’s vagaries, open to finding what happiness we can in an indifferent universe.

This is certainly worth reading, above all in conversation with North, but I do have to fault it some for dragging. North takes her excellent conception a step further by morphing it into a satisfying thriller. As this one ends, as we see all but Grimwood’s final point about uncertainty, it slows down. As a result, it drags both at the start and at the finish, not dramatically, but enough to make me prefer the fable North gives us to this genuinely ambitious sci-fi work of the 1980s.


View all my reviews