Radiance

Not only are there no happy endings, she told him, there aren't even any endings - Neil Gaiman, American Gods

When I think about trying to describe this book, the word I keep coming back to is kaleidoscope. It's a shiny, glittery, swirling ride that keeps circling back on itself with slight variations in the pattern. It's dizzying and beautiful and it doesn't want to be constrained by a single beginning, a single ending. It starts over several times, introducing beginnings late in the novel. And while the ending may be a foregone conclusion, it's also blurry and messy and happens a few times in a few different ways.

More than that, Valente experiments with style in a way I've never encountered in a single novel before. It steals from just about every genre you can name: noir, gothic, fairy tale, science fiction, murder mystery, western, radio broadcast, and on and on. The blurb on the back of the book begins "Radiance is a decopunk pulp SF, alt-history space opera mystery set in a Hollywood - and solar system - very different from our own".

So, yeah, there's a lot going on here.

Then again, it's a fairly simple story.  A woman disappears and the people around her (primarily her father, her lover, and his adopted son) try to figure out what happened. They search the solar system for answers, for closure, for some relief from the sense that they failed this woman. This novel is soaked in grief; it occasionally punches through with a sentence that twists your heart right around. Mostly it's apparent in her lover's anger, her father's desperation.

But while the story is twisting your heart, it's also twisting your brain. It's not often that you come across a novel that fundamentally shifts your perception of the world in some way, but this novel did. It's the story of the woman, Severin Unck, who disappeared. The story of her life and her life's work. It couldn't possibly be told in chronological order, because then it would make no sense. In her life, as in any life, cause and effect happen years apart. Her life contains many stories. Her life fails to be a complete story, as important things happen before she was born and continue to happen after she dies and it all informs who she was and what happened to her and why.

There are so many layers to this book, so many things to discover and unpack and push back together. It is an incredible work. It's the sort of book you could devote an entire semester to, perhaps an entire thesis. It is masterfully constructed, mind-blowing and heart-breaking and world-shifting. I was re-reading it while I was still reading it, as I made new discoveries and connected things back to previous chapters. I need to read it again. I need to talk about it with everyone I know. I need there to be an internet fandom on the order of Lord of the Rings or Buffy that I can sink into for the next few decades.

I believe that Radiance is destined to be a classic. One of the pillars of the genre, if it can ever pick a genre. Even I'm torn about whether to call it science fiction (because of the space travel and aliens) or fantasy (because of the reliance on a view of our solar system that went out of fashion half a century ago). Whatever it is, I loved it. I just might have a new favorite book.