By Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Ascher/Straus’s coauthored novel slips around its dreamily constructed narrative. The story nominally follows Valeria through her relationships with family, lovers, and acquaintances. But these are at times glancing and at other times porous. The lives of characters intersect with each other in indeterminate ways and movies broadcast on TV in the writerly equivalent of the Kuleshov Effect. But Ascher/Straus are aware of their structure providing the reader with the winking metacommentary: “Reality now had to compete with many realities.”

The ancillary stories – the recounting of midnight movies or of vague anecdotes – erupt into the primary narrative. Not explosively, but in a slow and steady channel of magma. The effect drives the narrative forward in a way reminiscent of J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. But Ascher/Straus present their narrative less jarringly, by letting episodic narratives subside and the main narrative return to prominence. The authors again provide metacommentary for their novel: “It was as if you were continually weaving a second life for yourself and this life was unavailable to you. Or as if, inside the first life, there were a pond, concealed by nothing more than forgetfulness, in which everything from the first life swam without its mask”

Valeria’s story traces the boundaries of human relationships in an age consumed by media. As Ascher/Straus imagine a future from the 1980s, they seem prescient. Even now the futurescape Valeria has helped create seems only a few years off with her prognostication that “WE DON’T WANT TO MEET CREATURES FROM ANOTHER PLANET. WE WANT TO BE CREATURES FROM ANOTHER PLANET!”

The Other Planet: A Novel of the Future
Ascher/Straus
McPherson & Company
ISBN: 978-1620540336