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The most daring element in this heterogeneous mix, however, may well be the vein of earnest solemnity that Johnson adds to it. Unlike most satirists, he's not afraid to let the mask of irony fall occasionally, launching into flights of plaintiveness that sometimes border on the maudlin. — Gary Krist |
New York Times Book Review |
...great ingenuity and bravado...Parasites Like Us is an artifact of real ambition and's got brilliance to burn. |
...not quite to deify Adam Johnson... hunt down, gather and devour this splendid novel. |
Publishers Weekly |
St. Louis Post-Dispatch |
Adam Johnson ... is gifted with a delightful, vibrant and occasionally all-encompassing vision. His "Parasites Like Us" is a strange, remarkable novel that is hilarious and infused with sparklingly imaginative and vivid detail -- part love story, part midlife crisis, part anthropological treatise and part futuristic sc... |
Kirkus Reviews |
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Product Details |
• ISBN-13: 9780142004777 |
• Publisher: Viking Penguin |
• Publication date: 10/27/2004 |
• Edition description: Reprint |
• Pages: 352 |
• Sales rank: 483,326 |
• Product dimensions: 5.44 (w) x 8.10 (h) x 0.81 (d) |
Meet the Author |
Adam Johnson |
Adam Johnson, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper's, Missouri Review, and New England Review, as well as Best New American Voices. He is the author of the short story collection Emporium and The Orphan Master's S... |
Good To Know |
In our interview, Johnson shared some fun facts about himself: |
"After high school, I worked industrial construction for a few years, building things like hotels and freeways. When I did get to college, late, I struggled with grades. A friend suggested taking a poetry class, which he said was an ‘easy A,' and by mistake, I signed up for a fiction class. Immediately I knew writing w... |
"My wife and I were married five times in five months in 2000 -- we went on a kind of wedding road show, taking the ceremonies to families and friends in different states. We had five best men, five maids of honor, and my wife had five fabulous wedding dresses. One wedding was hosted by the writers Robert Olen Butler a... |
Read More Show Less |
1. Hometown: |
San Francisco, California |
1. Date of Birth: |
July 12, 1967 |
2. Place of Birth: |
South Dakota |
1. Education: |
B.A., Arizona State University, 1992; M.A., M.F.A., McNeese State University, 1996; Ph.D., Florida State, 2001 |
Read an Excerpt |
Chapter One |
This story begins some years after the turn of the millennium, back when gangs were persecuted, back before we all joined one. In those days, birds and pigs were still our friends, and we held some pretty crazy notions: People said the planet was warming. Wearing fur was a no-no. Dogs could do no wrong. Back then, we'd... |
During this brief moment in human evolution, a professor of anthropology might, for the half-year he worked, fish in the morning, lecture midday, and stroll excavation sites until early evening, after which was personal/leisure time. I was a professor of anthropology, one of the very, very few. I owned a bass boat, a c... |
Camp Parkton, we called it. Club Fed. |
As an anthropologist, I had the job of telling stories about the past. My area of study was the Clovis people, the first humans to cross the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia about twelve thousand years ago. As you know, the Clovis colonized a hemisphere that had never seen humans before, and their first order of busines... |
I had a '72 Corvette and a custom van! |
Dear colleagues of tomorrow, fellow anthropologists of the future, how can I express my joy in knowing there is only one profession in the years to come, that each and every one of you has become a committed anthropologist? The trials of my life seem petty compared with their inevitable reward: that the turbulent story... |
The fate of the culture we called "America" is certainly no mystery to you. Of that tale, countless artifacts stand testament, and who could fail to hear such a song of conclusion, endlessly whistling through the frozen teeth of time? Yet you must have questions. Dig as you might, there must be gaps in the record. Who ... |
I'm not sure I can tell you the exact year this story be- gins, but I'll never forget the day. It was the season in South Dakota in which the Missouri River nearly freezes over-day by day, shelves of white extend their reach from the riverbanks, calciumlike, until they enter the central channel, where the current rips ... |
From my office on the campus of the University of Southeastern South Dakota, I could hear the frozen river wail and moan before a lurching crack tore loose a limb of ice. When the day was clear, I could even see from my window in the anthropology building scattered stains of red on the ice, where eagles had landed with... |
It was a gray, brooding day when Eggers, one of my star doctoral students, stuck his head in my office. He was vigorously chewing something, and the odds were it wasn't gum. |
Eggers wore goatskin breeches and a giant poncho of dark, matted fur, which he'd fashioned himself from animal hides begged off the Hormel meatpacking plant at the edge of town. I could smell him long before he made his way to the stacks of cardboard boxes that filled my doorway and spilled into the hall. |
"Careful of Junior," I said and waved him in. I had just received an exciting new crate of raw ice-core data from Greenland, and Eggers' booties were covered with God-knows-what. |
"Life's good, Dr. Hannah," Eggers said, making his way around the boxes. He displayed that impish grin of his. "Life is good," he repeated. |
My office in those days was filled with houseplants of every variety, though I found indoor gardening so pointless and sad I could barely stand to look at them. Eggers ducked under the hanging tendrils of plants whose names escaped me, his feet crunching across the layer of flint chips that littered the floor from the ... |
He took a seat, and I was confronted with my daily update on Eggers' dissertation project, which was to exist using nothing but Paleolithic technology for an entire year. More than eleven months into the experiment, some of the results were already clear: the wafting custard of his breath, the thin mistletoe of his bea... |
I should have been working on a grant proposal or grading some of the endlessly simple student papers that flowed across my desk. But I couldn't concentrate, because of Glacier Days, a yearly carnival intended to lighten the gloom of winter by celebrating the recession of the glaciers that had carved the Missouri River... |
"Okay, Eggers," I said. "Life's grand. We'll go with that hypothesis." |
Eggers shrugged, as if everything was self-evident. "Oh, it's not some theory, Dr. Hannah. Life is tiptop," he said, moving aside a dusty stack of my book, The Depletionists, and settling into a high-backed chair. He slumped enough that his hair left a sheeny streak down the leather upholstery. God, his game bag reeked... |
I was about to hear one of Eggers' continuing intrigues with a coed, or how he'd won some prestigious new grant. The anthropology journals were already fighting to publish his story. But I couldn't get that "life is good" phrase out of my head. It's what my stepmother, Janis, kept saying at the end, and it became one o... |
Eggers shifted what he was chewing and went after it with his molars. |
"Is this about Trudy?" I asked. |
"Trudy? Why bring her up?" he asked. "Are you feeling guilty, Dr. Hannah?" |
"What would I have to feel guilty about?" |
"Nothing," Eggers said. "Nothing. Except you did file the paperwork to revoke her Peabody Fellowship and give it to me." |
"The school's doing that. That's out of my hands. Congrats, by the way." |
"You know me, Dr. Hannah. I yawn at money. Money's obsolete to me." |
Eggers pulled something out of his mouth, inspected it, and put it back in. |
"Don't gloat," I told him. "Everything will be hunky-dory once I explain things to her." |
"Trudy's pretty upset. I mean, I was the one who broke it to her." |
"This isn't even official yet." |
"She needed to hear it from someone who cared," Eggers said. |
"Please," I said. "Anyway, that's only half the story. Losing her Peabody is only the bad news of a good-news/bad-news thing. I'll explain it to her." |
Eggers swallowed hard enough to make his eyes water, and then he opened the flap of his game bag. I could see a fuzzy tail sticking out of it, and it hadn't escaped the notice of the school paper that all the squirrels on campus had disappeared during the time that Eggers, an adult omnivore, had taken up residence in t... |
"I wouldn't worry about Trudy," Eggers said. "Trudy can take care of herself. She'll bounce back." He removed another sinewy morsel and slid it into his mouth. Though grayish-brown, it crunched like celery. He chewed it contemplatively. "I've got my own good and bad news," he added. |
I removed my glasses, folded them, rubbed the bridge of my nose. |
"Just the good," I said. "Only tell me the good." |
"I found something." |
Eggers was always finding things. He was the only person in town who walked everywhere, and over eleven months, his travels on foot had netted him countless arrow points, bison skulls, mastodon teeth, and a brass bell that may or may not have belonged to Meriwether Lewis. Sleeping in the same stretch of sand in South D... |
"Is it a spear point?" I asked. |
"It's a point, all right," Eggers said. |
"A Clovis point?" |
Eggers shrugged, but in a way that said, You can bet the farm. |
I threw a foot up on my desk to lace my snow-packs. "Show me," I said. |
We tromped downstairs and cut through the Hall of Man, a natural-history exhibit that my predecessor, Old Man Peabody, fashioned himself back in the 1960s out of an empty classroom. The Hall was about thirty feet long and lined with glassed-in exhibits. On one side was a series of models depicting glacial advance and r... |
Out in the quad, Eggers and I walked quietly through the snow. The limbs of the maples had been shorn off, so they were whitened posts against what was for now a clear sky. The sidewalks were sanded and salted, though we veered off through the hackberry trees, walking under their weblike branches and listening to the t... |
Eggers' shelter was situated in the middle of Central Green, and ahead I could see its snow-crusted dome, made from six curving mammoth tusks draped with a mass of various animal hides that had been confiscated over the years by the Fish and Game Department. Also ahead in the courtyard was a large granite stone that he... |
The proof of my cowardice was that my decision to talk to Janis always came down to whether or not I was alone. At least I didn't put a bench here, which I'd considered. |
Eggers could see the apprehension on my face. "Maybe I'll just go check my snares," he said, and headed toward the arbor-vitae hedge. |
"No, don't," I told him. "I'm okay." And like that, I resolved not to speak to Janis today. As I neared, though, I did look at her face, fixed in the mild relief of bronze. The birds had been crapping again, something I hadn't planned on when I'd commissioned the memorial. But, really, did it matter? How could someone ... |
My father had Janis cremated, something I'm against, but would it have made a difference if we'd buried her? Ten thousand years from now, when people exhumed her bones, what would they know of her life, her spirit? There would be her rings, traces of gold dentistry, perhaps. Would they know of her love of plants, that ... |
The snow thinned as we crossed Central Green, and it wasn't until you neared Eggers' dwelling, which he called his "lodge," that you realized it was situated, as if by chance, atop the one spot on the whole campus where there was no snow. There were underground steam tunnels that sent heat to the dormitories, and Egger... |
When Eggers pulled back the flap of his lodge, he was greeted by a package, wrapped in red paper and tied with yarn, and there was only the faintest smell of fire smoke. Of the gift, probably left by one of his female students, Eggers seemed to take no notice; instead, after the flap closed behind him, I heard him brea... |
Eggers emerged with a soft leather cloth that looked exactly like a chamois you'd use when washing a car. "This Clovis point is the cover of the Rolling Stone," Eggers said, handing it to me. "This is a feature article in Archeology Today." |
Through the leather cloth, I felt the weight and shape of the stone. You never forget the feel of a Clovis point. A hint of pink was peeking from under the cloth. |
"You know, I've never found an exotic one," I told Eggers. "In all my years of hunting. I've found some things, don't get me wrong, but never a colored Clovis point." |
"Well, this one's yours," Eggers said. |
I unfolded the cloth, and there it was. About five inches long, broad-headed, and cut from the rarest of materials, a semitranslucent rose quartz. Twelve thousand years ago, this artifact was the height of technology on the face of the earth, and no one in the millennia since has been able to reproduce the Clovis' lost... |
I ran my fingers down the dimpled spine of Eggers' pink point-the cutting edge was covered with serrated ridges that fanned forward to cause severe micro-hemorrhaging on penetration, while at the same time the plane of the blade was fluted with a ridge leading backward, serving as a channel to runnel the blood from the... |
Over the course of three centuries-at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, twelve thousand years ago-three amazing things happened: the Ice Age ended completely, and glaciers retreated from North America; humans entered the hemisphere, and these Paleo-Indians we call Clovis quickly spread across all forty-eight contiguous... |
Mammoth and mastodon skeletons have been found with dozens of Clovis points lodged in their bones. Many paleo- anthropologists agree that the Clovis people eradicated the elephants of North America, though they tend to believe the other large animals were killed off by climate change. |
It was my lone hypothesis, however, articulated in The Depletionists, that the Clovis blade was the demise of the North American camel, the giant sloth, the short-faced bear, and thirty-two other large mammals. And here was the very spear point that had done it. I marveled at its color, held it to the light, and saw th... |
"Okay," I asked Eggers, "where'd you really get this?" |
"I told you," he said. "I found it." |
An anger rose in me. "You found this and then removed it from the site? This point doesn't mean anything without context. Haven't I taught you anything? Unless it's in situ, where we can see its role in the bigger story, it's just a bauble." |
"It's more complicated than that," Eggers said. Students were filing out of Gufstason Hall, and his eyes followed their brightly colored jackets as they descended the slushy stairwell, arms out for balance, in baby steps. I looked at my wristwatch. It was just after noon, and my father would be waiting for me. |
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