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"Oh, Dr. Hannah," Trudy said, "you're so cute." |
She took the spear from my flaccid grip, and Eggers winked at me. |
Trudy hefted the weapon, felt its balance point, then raised it high. |
"What's the bumper sticker?" she asked. "'You can have my spear when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.'" |
The pig cocked its head curiously. |
Then it happened. Trudy rotated her body and, drawing back, charged a throw that began in the ball of her foot. The leg followed, the hip lifting, rotating the torso around so the arm whipped like a sling. The spear launched, and the follow-through was complete enough that it left her facing sideways, hopping on one foot. |
Almost as quickly as it was thrown, the spear crossed the pen and landed with a great thuk that opened a gaping, pleated wound, from which escaped a gurgly hiss as the lung pushed and pulled air through the puncture. The handle of the spear bobbed with the breath of the hog, and with every little movement, the blade walked itself deeper into the cavity of the chest. The pig let out one faint whine before its front legs crossed, almost daintily, and it went down, rolling to its side so that its final breaths sent up mists of blood that speckled the wall a steaming pink. |
Eggers looked stunned. He climbed over the rail and walked cautiously to the pig. He leaned over it. "Holy shit," he said. |
"Wait," I called. At any moment, that hog could jump up and slay us all. If one thing was constant in the history of the world, it was the notorious danger of pigs. They were the bane of early Mesopotamia, and in African folklore there is no more dangerous beast. Even the Clovis could not handle them. The Clovis eradicated the American lion, the saber-toothed tiger, and the dire wolf, but the wild boar was one of the few animals to live through that age of eradication. |
Trudy joined Eggers. She was still shaking out her arm from the throw as she approached the pig. She crouched above a pool of blood gelling against the cold asphalt. She reached for it. |
"Don't," I murmured. "Think of the parasites, the trichinosis, the bloodworms." |
Trudy placed her palm in the blood, then, dripping, showed it to me. |
"This is the first art," she said. "This is the original ink." |
On the wall of the shed, Trudy drew a horizon line in red. Below it, she fashioned a circle, the sun of the underworld. Above the line, she used her fingers to make a set of antlers, pointing down. I recognized the symbol, haunting and primordial. She drove around Parkton with it painted on the black hood of her beater GTO. |
Eggers pulled a flake from his game bag and cut the spear point free of the shaft. He brought it to me and placed it bloody in my hands, still warm from the pig. |
"Here you go, Dr. Hannah," he said. "One Clovis point, as promised." |
Then Trudy came toward me, face flushed from the cold, hands red, that great staticky blue light of death around her, and I thought, Yes. Perhaps my father's rakish thinking had infected me, but my hands were shaking for her. |
"Are you ready?" she asked, and when I nodded, we all started running. |
In bed that night, I woke to a roar from the Missouri as a shearing expanse of ice broke away. It sent a wake underneath the whole ice sheet, so that, when the wave reached the shore, you could hear fifty-five-gallon drums leap from the frozen grip of the river as, one by one, everyone's docks cracked free. I knew a great ice raft, large as a lecture hall, was spinning its way downstream. |
I sat up in bed, and slowly, by starlight, began to make out the dark tendrils of all the silent houseplants that hung in my room. I checked my bedside table, and, sure enough, there was the stained Clovis point from earlier, right where I'd set it- beside a plaster cast of my mother's leg, removed just before she left us for good. Though I hadn't heard from her in thirty years, I felt pretty confident that, with the cast and maybe an X-ray of the break, I'd be able to identify my mother if I ever came across her. |
Often when I couldn't sleep, I'd pick up that knee-high cast and trace the shape of my mother's calf, feel the shadows left by the fine bones in her feet, but tonight I reached for the Clovis point. The quartz was smooth and warm in the dark, and instead of its conjuring in my mind the story of a people older than civilization, I thought of Trudy. How natural this point had seemed in her hand, and with what kinship did she speak of its fashioner. Trudy seemed to know its song, and the shameful arousal I felt for her, for one of my students, as I replayed the way she launched that spear was eclipsed only by the horror of where it had landed. |
Did the Clovis people know the glaciers were on the move? Did the dinosaurs comprehend the impending comet? Janis didn't know what the universe had in store. I heard the ice again, and imagined white rafts slowly floating down thousands of miles of river, a history of ice, and on these barges in my mind, I saw things and people, floating backward, away from me, into the dark. Our old dog Roamy was on one, and another was piled with the sagging boxes of Junior, index cards and notepads spilling into the current. I looked for Old Man Peabody, for Janis, for the father I used to know. Who floated by instead, alone on a piece of ice big enough for all of us, was my mother, frozen the way I last saw her, the way I would forever imagine her-in a pale-blue housecoat, holding a pale-blue handbag, leaning on aluminum crutches-and the farther she floated from me the less I was sure whether she was facing toward me or away. My imagination took a bird's-eye view as I attempted to follow her into the dark, flat landscape, cut only by the cold river of history. At the edge of sleep, I, too, was on the ice, riding it into darkness. I was not cold on this ice, only seized by the notion that if I floated far enough I'd ride the river back in time, back to the Pleistocene, a place where men and women lined the banks with pink spears. As I floated by, they shouted messages for me to deliver to their ancestors. |
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Reading Group Guide |
Our Book Club Recommendation |
Adam Johnson's unique novel has a little bit of everything. Parasites like Us contains high-flying satire of contemporary society, fascinating historical and ecological speculation, and a frightening scenario of humanity's near future. This potent combination is tied together by the engaging character of Hank Hannah, a South Dakota anthropologist distinctly down on his luck, whose involvement in an earth-shattering discovery has consequences both bizarre and enlightening. This tragicomedy of ideas provides a wide array of topics for reading groups to reflect on, in the midst of its farcically entertaining scenario. |
When Hank and his students, who are engaged in the study of prehistoric North American peoples, discover a remarkable, ancient skeleton, questions are raised about our relationship to the past and our responsibility with regard to human history. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the consequences of this discovery are even larger than first assumed. Johnson offers up for discussion powerful themes about man's relationship to nature and how we choose to represent that relationship in the way we think about our ancestors. |
Beyond issues of the environment and human civilization, this is also a novel about loss and family. Hank is tormented by the question of why his mother left when he was a baby, and he has a complicated relationship with his decidedly unconventional father. Hank compensates for this in various ways, in part by seeing his two star students, Eggers and Trudy, almost as surrogate children. Reading groups will discover that beneath the fantastic exterior of the plot, Johnson's novel offers as a powerful theme the fragmented state of the modern family, asking how far we might have to go in order to repair those ruptures. |
Parasites like Us has been frequently compared to the work of Kurt Vonnegut. It's easy to see overt parallels to Vonnegut's tongue-in-cheek novels that imagine bizarre future catastrophes, such as Cat's Cradle or Slapstick. But readers are likely to notice an even more important parallel: Beneath the irony and the absurdity of Johnson's imagined South Dakota is the same warm sense of humanity that informs the best of Vonnegut's work. It's an aspect of Parasites like Us that book groups may find -- against all expectation -- truly inspiring. Bill Tipper |
Reading Group Resources from the Publisher |
Adam Johnson's short stories have been praised as "Salingeresque" (New York Times), "remarkable" (New Yorker), and "creating a searing juxtaposition between scientific progress and its futility in the face of mortality" (San Francisco Chronicle). Now, with Parasites Like Us, Johnson lives up to and surpasses that praise in a novel that looks deeply into both the past and the future of the human species. |
Parasites Like Us is narrated by anthropologist Hank Hannah, author of the now largely discredited book The Depletionists, which argued that our Ice Age ancestors, the Clovis people, wiped out thirty-five species of large mammals. As the novel begins, Dr. Hannah is haunted by his own past. He is grieving for the disappearance of his mother, the death of his stepmother, and the loss of his former glory as an academic star and darling of the lecture circuit. He does, however, have two brilliant students, Eggers and Trudy, working with him, and together they begin to make discoveries-of the prodigious powers of the Clovis spearhead and of what are possibly the oldest human remains ever found in North America-that would validate the thesis of The Depletionists and resurrect Dr. Hannah's career. But digging into the past can be a dangerous occupation; it can cast a harsh light on the present. Dr. Hannah sees all too clearly that the selfishness of the Clovis people-their willingness to plunder "the first sunny days of humanity"-is just as strong today, as we continue to exploit the earth and all its creatures for our use. And when a brutally fatal infectious disease sweeps the land, transmitted through the animals we've lived on, humans begin a gruesome extermination, a mass slaughter of pigs and cows and chickens, that makes our ancestors look tame. But it is too late to stop the epidemic. Only Dr. Hannah and his small band survive, thanks to a chance encounter with Clovis culture, and they must face a grim journey-through frozen landscapes with burning corpses and roving packs of dogs-into a future that looks all too much like the distant past. |
What makes Parasites Like Us such a remarkably ambitious and satisfying novel is its combination of satire and pathos. It is at once a searing critique of human arrogance and a compassionate regard for human weakness, a provocative analysis of where we have come from and a harrowing vision of where we are headed. |
Adam Johnson, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, teaches at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, and the Paris Review, as well as Best New American Voices four years running. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and newborn son, James Geronimo. |
What prompted you to write Parasites Like Us? Did you do a great deal of research for the novel? |
I've always been fascinated by primitive technologies. Growing up, I heard many tales of outdoor survival from male relatives. These were sophisticated men, yet they had hidden abilities, like building snow caves, setting animal snares, or lashing emergency rafts. I never learned any of these skills, mostly because I lived with my mother after my parents' divorce. In college, however, I met a surgeon whose passion was flint-knapping-the art of making stone knives and points. His dream was to perform heart surgery with stone blades, which, he said, could be made sharper than any scalpel. He was the one who first told me about the Clovis people and the way they had created stone spear points so deadly that even twelve thousand years later, they were nearly impossible to re-create. |
In writing this book, I wanted to take the reader back in time-back to a point when human connections to land, food, weather, and so on were intimate ones. I felt that with each chapter, as the book marches forward, the narrator, Dr. Hannah, moves a thousand years back through time. Slowly, he is stripped of modern conveniences-his car, his possessions, his bathroom, and finally things like phones and electricity-until, metaphorically, he has entered the age of the Clovis. The place he arrives at, because of its constant peril, is one where relationships become even more important. Only in a world of primitive technology do friends, family members, and the woman he loves attain the level of interdependence that he's always hoped for. |
I didn't learn to dogsled or hurl spears to research this book, but I read survival narratives, geology studies, hunting guides, and lithics journals. I devoured many books about early North American peoples and about paleo-anthropology in general. I think a reader will walk away from this book having learned a great deal about the ancestors of this continent, and for that reason, I tried to focus on the themes of paleolithic life, rather than on scientific theories. |
Did you intend the novel to be read as a kind of warning? Do you feel the history of the Clovis people has special relevance to our own situation? |
The story of the Clovis people is a cautionary tale for our time. The Clovis were probably the first North Americans, though little is actually known about them. They crossed the Bering Land Bridge when the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, a time when most large mammals-like the mammoth and the mastodon-went extinct. Then in 1929, at a site near Clovis, New Mexico, a mammoth bone was found with a large spear point embedded in it. Many more sites were found, and a new portrait of the Clovis people began to emerge, one in which humans entered a new frontier and founded an empire on hunting. Within these three centuries of the Clovis' arrival, most of the large mammals of North America had been eradicated, including mammoths, camels, horses, and oxen, leaving thousands of future generations without the animals needed for domestication, transportation, and agriculture. After most of the large animals of America disappeared, so did the Clovis, and this is the metaphor at the heart of the book: a people came to a new frontier and built a grand culture based on natural resources, and once those resources were depleted, the culture fell apart, leaving their descendants impoverished. |
What similarities do you see between the stories told by anthropologists and those told by novelists? |
I don't think there's any scientific method in my work, but I feel an affinity for those who apply it, especially when constructing narratives about the past, the way historians and paleo-anthropologists do. I do feel anthropologists must take some the same imaginative leaps as fiction writers to find truth out of the details. The writer must construct the life of a living character in the same way that an anthropologist must construct the lives of the dead out of fragments. |
How would you describe the relationship between Dr. Hannah's family and the larger history of the human family in the novel? |
Dr. Hannah's personal creation myth is based on his abandonment by his mother, and of course, he secretly fears he exhausted her love and drove her away. He has no other way to approach the world than by way of this essential story, and it is only fitting that his theory of the Clovis is one in which a people exhausted all that supported them, thus causing their tribe to disband. |
Michiko Kakutani has applied the term "Salingeresque" to your work. Do you feel a particular affinity for Salinger? What other writers have been important influences for you? |
I think of Salinger as a "voice" writer; he had a pitch-perfect ear for how his characters spoke, especially when telling their own stories. As a writer who loves to work in the first person, I truly admire this quality. Something my characters tend to share with Salinger's is a constant concern with what's false and what's real. His characters tended to be flawed and a little "phony" themselves, but they yearned for the real, pure thing that could redeem them. The comparisons probably end there. Salinger was a really, really good writer, and I see myself as a comparative beginner. |
A book that influenced me was early was The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux, which I read after high school. I wasn't a big reader back then, but the characterization of the father figure spoke to me-here was another father who dropped out of society and attempted to go "back to basics" in an effort to reinvent himself. I also shared the narrator's awe for an iconoclastic and self-destructive father. The "well-meaning but deluded believer" is a repeating character of mine, and I first encountered it in The Mosquito Coast. |
Do you have a strong personal or autobiographical connection to the novel, or is it a purely imaginative work? |
The novel attempts to answer a simple yet eternal question: Where do people go when they leave us? When my mother was a child, she was abandoned by her mom. And when I was a child, my parents were divorced. While my mother rarely mentioned her mother, I constantly wondered where my father was. What was he doing? I wanted to know. Who was he with, and what television show was he watching? I wanted to know what this better life was, this life that didn't include my mother and me. I placed this seed of speculation in my central character, and soon it seemed right that he was a paleo-anthropologist, one who specialized in faraway peoples, and this became a vehicle to explore the tensions between need and inaccessibility. |
Do you have any special writing routines or rituals? What are you working on now? |
The only writing ritual I have is a sleeping baby. When the little one finally goes to sleep, then I can go to work. Right now I'm in the first stages of a new novel set in Los Angeles. |
1. In what ways is the history of the Clovis and their interaction with their environment, as it is presented in Parasites Like Us, relevant to our own situation? |
2. Dr. Hannah frequently addresses his story to future anthropologists. How does this narrative device affect the way he tells the story and the way we read it? What does he try to communicate to future generations? What is significant about the artifacts he chooses to provide drawings for? |
3. Near the end of the novel, Dr. Hannah observes that "the successful forms of life are the parasites, the ones who bleed their environment to optimal exploitation, who stunt everything by taking a lion's share, who leave their hosts alive but shriveled" (p. 326). Why did Adam Johnson title his novel Parasites Like Us? How does the above passage illuminate human behavior, past and present? |
4. Dr. Hannah reflects that "as you pick through the bones of the past, you have to keep in mind that you'll never really know another human's story. The point of anthropology is not discovery, but learning to tolerate the unknown" (p. 57). Why isn't it possible to know another human's story? In what ways is the novelist, like the anthropologist, also attempting to know, and to tell, another human's story? |
5. In comparing the Clovis to modern humans, Dr. Hannah observes that "if the history of humanity has been the history of extinguishing other forms of life, it's hard to say whether we have been evolving" (p. 304). Does the novel make the case that humans have not significantly evolved beyond their Ice Age predecessors? In what ways are the people in the novel like the Clovis people? |
6. Dr. Hannah tells Eggers that "the past is a trap . . . we should only go there armed with shovels and torches" (p. 58). In what sense is Dr. Hannah's own personal past a trap? How might his personal history affect how he sees human history? |
7. Why does Dr. Hannah feel such affection for his students, Eggers and Trudy? How does his relationship with them change and deepen over the course of the novel? What does he teach them? |
8. Trudy suggests that Peabody's Hall of Man exhibit is "more about the Northern European male who created it than the culture he thought he was depicting" (p. 56). How have depictions of our evolutionary ancestors affected our sense of "natural" gender roles today? In what ways does Trudy defy these roles? |
9. What is important about Dr. Hannah's relationships to the women in the novel-Janis, his mother, Trudy, and Yulia? What do his feelings about these women reveal about him? |
10. As the novel ends, Dr. Hannah and his small group embark on a journey, one that would "shuttle us off this continent by the same route that had brought the Clovis, thus concluding humanity's twelve-thousand-year camp-out in North America. The trip wouldn't be so hard. We'd taught a thousand students how it went. It was a story we knew by heart" (p. 339). What ironies are involved in this reversal of the journey of the Clovis? What does he mean by saying that they knew the story by heart? What do you imagine might happen to these characters next? |
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Customer Reviews |
Average Rating 3.5 |
( 8 ) |
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Sort by: Showing all of 8 Customer Reviews |
• Posted January 3, 2012 |
Read this book a few years and while i don't remember every detail i do remember reading it in two sittings. |
I found the book fun and compelling and was entertained, which for me was why i wanted to read it in the first place! |
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• Anonymous |
Posted October 15, 2006 |
Worth The Bargain Price - But Not Full Price... |
This book was a big disappointment. I wholeheartedly agree another reviewer that at least 1/3 of this book could have been edited out and it wouldn't have impacted the book a bit. Although the book moved along at a good pace, the main character's wallowing got tiring after a while. The best part of the book were the last 30-50 pages where it finally had a point. |
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• Anonymous |
Posted July 6, 2006 |
33% needs to be edited out |
Listen, I think you need to hear me on this one. I feel pretty sure you will find youself skipping whole paragraphs, sometimes whole pages , KNOWING that you made the right decision. The sub plot-less bits about the abandonment by mother and father figures goes nowhere. I kept thinking it would all tidy up and come together near the end. No such luck! I kept getting the feeling that the reason the main charactor was so all alone in life was that the people who met him realized he was a one hit wonder who talked incessantly. Finishing the book, I wonder if Johnson doesn't suffer a similar fate. The lengths to which the professor goes on and on and on ,not only to himself but embarassingly in front of any crowd gathered, tears little bits and pieces of any concern the reader may have for him away. By the end, I sort of wished he would suffer at least some slapstick death or cosmic just desserts. Spending 200 pages droning on about the minutia of a wasted life in preparation for 50 pages on the end of civilization seems oddly off balance. |
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• Anonymous |
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