I can assure you this: Even if you don’t enjoy every page or plotline of Under Story, Chloe Benjamin's new 500+ page epic, you WILL be wow’ed by it as an ambitious feat of storytelling and imagination.
It’s like if Blake Crouch (Dark Matter specifically) met Richard Powers and they had a joint fever dream about The Time-Traveler’s Wife or Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life.
The story is about a Madison, Wisconsin woman named Laurel, a former mycologist, who, reeling from a divorce, signs onto kitchen duty at a research base called McMurdo in Antarctica. For the first 200 pages or so, we watch Laurel fit into the day-to-day and slowly learn about her backstory relationship with a dude named Eli, a physicist, who she met in high school. That's the setup and it big-bang-explodes from there -- not just plotwise, but this novel is teeming with life; asides about physics, mushrooms, the natural world, consciousness, the spark of inspiration, the need for connection, and so much more.
Within the first 20 pages, I knew I was in the hands of a talented and engaging writer who was going to tell me a story I wouldn’t soon forget. And I wasn't wrong. In this wonderful piece at the Chicago Review of Books, writer Rowan Beaird sets up her interview with Benjamin by describing the novel as "immersive," like the novels we stayed up past our bedtimes to read when we were kids. And that feels like the perfect description for this book.
But.
In the back half of the story (which I can't tell you about without spoiling the major plot hinge, though I can tell you this is speculative fiction, so things get weird), we spend a lot of time learning new "rules" (which, if you’re a “guy in my MFA”-type reader, and you spend just a little time thinking about, you can probably poke some pretty big plot holes here). And we get a little bogged down. So I think here the storytelling becomes almost too big of a swing and the novel nearly collapses under the weight of its own ambition. You know me, I love long novels. But perhaps some judicious trimming might've speeded things along a little.
Still.
Even as we slow a bit, you cannot stop turning these pages. You NEED to know how this winds up. These characters are so compelling and so beautifully human.
So I say don't let the fact that this novel's not perfect get in the way of the fact that it's very good -- and I think some readers will forgive its "sins" more readily than I did. I enjoyed my time with it, for sure. And I'm truly in awe of the craft and imagination it must've taken to pull this off as well as she did.
