A first-rate central concept inside a second-rate plot wrapper. After reading two Blake Crouch novels, Crouch's gift for concept is obvious, but writing believable and well-resolved narrative arcs is an area for improvement.
We'll start with this novel's concept layer, the multiverse: the idea that there are an infinite number of possible universes, and with every choice we make, every fork in our road, a new separate universe will exist for any and all of these possible choices. Dark Matter is a story about a physicist, Jason Dessen, who figures out a way to place a human being into "superposition," enabling him to move from quantum universe to quantum universe, and even to choose which quantum universe to inhabit.
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This is genuinely provocative: what if you could choose a universe to live in? Would you choose the universe where you were successful and rich? Where you found true love?
The book goes deeper. Consider if an alternate you violently stole your place in your life, and started living with (and sleeping with) "your" wife. How are you supposed to feel? Should you be jealous... of yourself? Or horrified that you/him are both the kind of person who, under the right circumstances, would do such a thing? In other words, if you had the power to choose a "better" universe, what might that power do to you?
The plot features at first two--and later, hundreds--of quantum versions of the main character, and the storyline becomes unusual and downright interesting as more and more of the various "quantum Jasons" converge on the same universe. Dark Matter gathers a decent bit of psychological and philosophical heft as the main character, Jason, starts to think deeply about who he really is, as he sees other quantum versions of himself doing violent, even depraved, things in order to steal his place in "his" universe. When you see other "yourselves" doing these things, you can't help but take it as evidence that you are exactly the kind of person who would also do these kinds of things. The main character (as well as the reader) becomes deeply disturbed by the implications.
Unfortunately, the plot ultimately flops into a series of implausible scenes that summarily wrap up the story. Further, the author indulges in a bad habit of using repeated one-line sentences--a technique that can be used to build tension, but when used page after page after page it becomes a hack technique to build tension, making that tension phony (see the notes to Chapter 14 below for an example).
The author overuses MacGuffins too: as crutches to move the plot along, to help the main character escape or stay alive, or to help various characters find one another in various quantum universes. There's even a fairly major character used as a MacGuffin (Amanda, the therapist/fellow employee for those who've read the book) who performs a series of convenient functions before promptly disappearing out of the story. All of this forces the reader to suspend more disbelief than is sporting.
Finally, Dark Matter's poorly-integrated, unsatisfying story arc really wrecks the book at the worst possible time, the end, with implausible behavior from the characters and an even more implausible plot resolution. It's unfortunate to build a novel on such an interesting and provocative concept, but end it on such a weak note. The reader closes the book disappointed at what could have been a very good novel.
One last thought, a real-world takeaway from a readable and reasonably interesting book. Unless you're sincerely tethered to people--a family, a community, close friends, a confidant, a partner--you're not really part of this world. The various quantum universe Jasons who try to steal into a "better" universe are all out of place, they simply don't belong. You can't become part of a new world when you're part and parcel of another. There are implications here for people who leave their countries, who leave their families, who leave their partners: a part of you is lost forever when that happens and you can't get it back.
[Readers, the usual friendly warning: what follows are my notes and quotes from the text, which are meant to help me order my thinking and better remember what I read. They might be worth skimming. Also there are spoilers ahead!]
Notes:
Note the frontispiece quote of lines of T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" (from the Four Quartets). The Four Quartets is a worthwhile read, and a worthwhile re-read, incorporating Zen, paradox and the circularity of life, all within a beautiful four-part poem.
Chapter 1:
Jason, our main character, a frustrated scientist, is more or less happily married with a wife and son, but he finds out about a peer from his PhD days who won a major award; he heads over to a local pub to grudgingly help the person celebrate; on his way home he's nearly hit by a car, and then he's abducted by a masked, gun-wielding man who drugs him.
Chapter 2:
Jason wakes up, is strapped and secured to a gurney; he thinks the whole thing isn't real; we meet Leighton Vance, chief executive and medical officer, who acts like a friend and colleague; Jason is subjected to some different decontamination procedures on his body.
"I don't understand what's happening. I don't know where I--"
"The disorientation will pass. I'll be closely monitoring. We'll get you through this."
He wheels the gurney to the door but stops in the threshold, glancing back at me through his face shield. "It's really good to see you again, brother. Feels like Mission Control when Apollo Thirteen returned. We're all real proud of you."
Jason struggles to regain his memory, he has a fading image of his teenage son; and then he's brought to a debriefing session to the applause of a group of workers. During the debriefing session he is told "you're the only one to return." Jason excuses himself from the debrief, saying he feels ill and goes into a bathroom next to Leighton Vance's office, locks the door and escapes through a window, flags down a cab and returns home.
Chapter 3:
Jason enters his home--at least what he thinks is his home--but there's no indication of his son or wife living there, and the house is much nicer and fancier than he remembers; also he see the Pavia Prize in what should be his son's room; then Leighton Vance and some of the company staff come to the house to try to talk to him; the author uses a pretty blatant MacGuffin here, introducing a laundry chute that should have been mentioned earlier in the novel as part of the house; Jason jumps into it and escapes again, eventually going into the ER of the hospital, he's admitted; while in his hospital room he tries to work out what's happening to him.
Chapter 4:
[This is an alternate quantum reality, although the reader doesn't know this yet] Jason arrives at his home after three hours, explaining to Daniela how he was almost hit by a cab on his way home, how he never felt so alive, they make love.
Chapter 5:
Jason is in his hospital room; traces of ketamine and other psych meds were found in his system; the doctor tells him she plans to put him under an (involuntary) 72 hour psychiatric hold. He slips out of the hospital and escapes, goes to a hotel and continues trying to figure out what the hell's going on, using some of the principles from his domain of experimental physics: start on smaller problems before you can get to the overarching problem of the totality of what has happened to him. He finds Daniela's apartment in the phone book, goes to her building and sees that just this very night [another McGuffin!] she's giving a major art exhibit. Jason goes to it, talks to her and realizes that Daniela doesn't know who Charlie their son is; then he talks to Ryan, who has none of the "arrogance and swagger" of the Ryan he knew in his other reality; it turns out Ryan and Daniela are dating casually. In her apartment after the showing, he talks out some of what happened with Ryan and Daniela, Ryan leaves angrily.
"This is possibly the most surreal moment I've experienced since coming to consciousness in that lab--sitting in bed in the guest room of the apartment of the woman who is my wife but isn't, talking about the son we apparently never had, about the life that wasn't ours."
He stays with her a few days, they make passionate love one night, thus he realizes that she's his "the one" regardless of which quantum universe happens to be his. Later that night, a man breaks into their apartment and shoots Daniela between the eyes, and then ties up Jason and duct tapes his mouth [implausible plotting here: it would be far more believable for the assassin to kill "main character" Jason here too... but then that would be the end of the novel.]
Chapter 6:
[Again, this is an alternate quantum universe] Jason, Daniela and Charlie are at a baseball game; Jason and Daniela talk out why he's so passionate lately; in a conversation about quantum universes, he talks about why he believes the universe he is in right now is the best of all of them.
Chapter 7:
Jason pretends that he is sane and asks to learn about the company he and Leighton Vance started; it's a large scale Schrodinger's cat mechanism that can place an object into superposition, literally splitting universes, branching them; we learn that the universe splits whenever something is observed. "A man of epic vision built this box. A smarter, better me." "What I can tell you is that box creates and sustains an environment where everyday objects can exist in a quantum superposition."
The company gives him access to his alternate self's work: "It's like forgetting everything about yourself and then reading your own biography."
Later Leighton brings Ryan into a meeting with Jason; Ryan has been beaten, and Jason realizes that Ryan had offered him a drug compound that enabled the human mind to change the way it perceives reality so that it doesn't "decohere" all the possible multiverses.
The author inserts yet another [!!!] McGuffin here, arranging the preposterously unlikely circumstance that Ryan and Jason are kept in the same cell together; thus they can figure out what happened together [in dialog that serves as expository for the reader's benefit]. This would never happen in a real situation: these two guys would never be allowed to talk to each other. It turns out that Ryan created a drug compound that interfered with the human brain's ability to observe, this eliminated the "observer effect" in quantum physics, and allowed the possibility of putting a human being into superposition.
[Funny sentence here: "I hear the voice of my abductor, somehow familiar, asking questions about my life." So the author is talking to a muscle in his leg?]
And then Jason learns, or at least hypothesizes, that the man who abducted him was actually him, the "Jason" from the universe where he became a dazzling scientist, and that "Jason" wanted to go back to a simple life with his Daniela and his son--and he was willing to kill that "Jason" in that universe, and take his place. But yet at the same time, it was still "him" who did all these things, and this disgusts him about himself, that he would be capable of doing this. [And now, restrospectively, the reader understands why, in the chapters where Jason is grateful to be with Daniela in the original universe, this particular Jason is so grateful; we now understand precisely what was happening in those chapters.]
Amanda, the staff psychiatrist arrives, angry at the actions of her company, including the fact that they killed Ryan, and she helps Jason get to "the box." [Again this is a Macguffin: there is no way any kind of company with any kind of legitimate security would ever let this happen.] They make it there just before security can stop them, and then they both inject themselves with the "anti-decohering" compound.
Chapter 8:
Over the course of this chapter Jason and Amanda figure out that it's their minds that actually control the quantum universe that they go into; they discover this after thinking about what they had been thinking about when they went into one universe where they didn't make it back into the quantum box, and then another universe with freezing white out conditions. Amanda and Jason then talk about the "first" Jason who developed the company, and Jason shares his theory that it was that Jason who abducted him and traded quantum universes with him. They talk out some of the circumstances, Amanda saying that the first Jason was obsessed with the "path not taken."
Chapter 9:
Daniela begins noticing things that are different about Jason, ranging from how he drives to how often he shaves, as well as other behaviors that don't match his behaviors from before.
Chapter 10:
Jason and Amanda now realize that they can "articulate" the type of quantum universe they want to go to by writing down thoughts and images and impressions they want to characterize that universe. [This is kind of a nice synergy here with visualization exercises, NLP, and autosuggestion.] They first arrive at a futuristic Chicago that's about the exact opposite of the gritty Chicago they know; on their next attempt Jason writes down "I want to go home," and they enter a scene much like where he was when he was abducted; this universe, however, is experiencing a pandemic and the city is under a total quarantine [interesting here to read this as the book came out in 2016, four years before COVID]; in this universe his son died of the plague, his quantum alt-self here died of the plague, and his wife is dying of the plague. They manage to escape this universe after a car chase, under a hail of gunfire from curfew-enforcing police.
They attempt to work out how the written statement "I want to go home" didn't work; the reader learns that Jason lost his mother to illness when he was young and so he carried baggage onto this overly-vague statement. [The story is well served by having a therapist as Jason's partner here in each of these excursions to alternate universes, another MacGuffin, albeit a good one.] Jason then writes down in exquisite detail the world that he knows [Again, just like with visualization exercises, they must be done in extremely rich detail, even including smells, colors, sounds, everything.]
Chapter 11:
Jason and Amanda have now tried four more quantum Chicagos, but none is quite right; they're all kind of "uncanny valley" versions of his real universe. Jason contemplates what precisely makes him him, if you "strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle." In one of the universes Jason and Amanda sleep in the same bed, but he doesn't seal the deal, he feels guilty about it. [Here we can see a blatant difference between American writing and what you'd find in, say, Russian literature.]
They go to other universes, one where Daniela had died of brain cancer and he was killed in a car accident, another where she doesn't even know who he is, and when he tries to ask her out for coffee he comes off as creepy and then he skulks out of her art gallery. He starts to appreciate all the little things that you get so accustomed to in quotidian life that you stop appreciating them: coming home to someone, hearing their voice, etc.
Jason then spends an entire day stalking his own family in one of the quantum universes. He realizes to his horror that the other "Jason" did the very same thing, maybe for weeks; Amanda warns him that he might be nearing a psychotic break.
Chapter 12:
Jason wakes up, discovering that Amanda has left, leaving him a note saying that she's going off on her own taking half of their ampoules of the drug compound that enables the superposition. Jason then attempts a few more universes: in one of them he gets beaten up by young men who run off with his backpack and most of his remaining ampoules, leaving him homeless, without money, begging; at one point the Jason of this universe actually gives him $5, never recognizing the beat-up, malnourished and unkempt Jason was actually his quantum twin. The odds of him finding his universe always were tiny, one among an infinity of possibilities, but now because he's running out of drug compound ampoules, he's down to only one or two more tries.
Chapter 13:
[This is the mother of all implausible plot outcomes]: Jason finds himself in what appears to be his original universe, he looks in the window of his home and sees the other Jason; he's possessed by jealousy; he wonders whether Daniela is happier with that Jason rather than him, and then he metawonders if he could even stand to know the answer to such a question. He realizes he has to do a terrible thing in this universe to get his life back.
He then goes to a local sports store to buy a gun, but the woman behind the counter tells him he was in the store two days ago (!) [Note that here the reader starts to feel some genuine tension] and then further tells him he'd been to the store another three times in the past week.
Jason has an idea to check his email, he knows his password in this universe (of course!); he finds an invite to a usergroup with several Jasons in it, he's assigned the username "Jason9" and discovers that most of the other quantum Jasons have already thought about getting a gun. One of the Jasons posts "Did everyone run through the game theory scenarios?" Another posts "You can all just kill yourselves and let me have her." He then gets a PM from Jason7 asking if he wants to team up and get rid of all the others. [Wild!] His hotel room phone rings: he picks up and hears nothing but breathing, and then realizes that he's been found by another quantum version of himself who is likely there to kill him; he runs out of his room and sees another Jason at the end of the hall, raising a gun. He runs out of side door and sees another Jason, this one wielding a knife, also trying to kill him.
Our protagonist then finally plays out some game theory of his own and realizes any logical idea he arrives at will already be anticipated by any other version of himself. Thus he decides to apply randomness. He reasons randomness will be the only thing his "opponents" won't anticipate. He contrives to get arrested by smoking in a diner, and then uses his phone call to call his wife to come and bail him out. He persuades her and their son that he's the real Jason; the son actually got a weird vibe from the Jason who took the original Jason's place [children know!]. The three of them plot their escape.
Chapter 14:
Jason, Daniela and their son drive to Wisconsin and stay in an abandoned off-season lakefront house. He talks with Daniela about what it was like for her being with Jason2, then he hatches a plan to have an honest lottery with all the other Jasons, with the winner getting to "have" the family. The next morning he talks to Daniela about her life in the universe where she was a brilliant artist. "Do you think I was happy?" she asks. They have breakfast, and Jason thinks about how it's probably the last breakfast he'll ever have with them.
[See the photo below] There are only so many one-line sentences a reader can take. The author uses this to manufacture tension, but it is a blunt and hackneyed technique. The author overuses it throughout the book and massively overuses it here in the final climactic chapters.
It turns out one of the other quantum Jasons (who he already knows from an earlier scene) has broken into the house, killed two other Jasons, and likely shot a third. He orders "real" Jason to take off his clothes.
"How many of us have you murdered tonight?" I ask.
"Four. I'll kill a thousand of you if that's what it takes."
They begin fighting, and then someone shoots the other Jason: it turns out to be Jason2, and he's about to kill the "real" Jason as well, but Daniela comes into the room and tells everyone to stop: she shouts at Jason2, "How could you do this to me? To our family? He answers: "I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice."
A laughably implausible scene here, where the original Jason manages to slap the gun out of Jason2's hands; he stabs him repeatedly, and then while he's dying asks him where his car is--and he answers! And then tells him to look in the glove box while holding his wedding band towards him. Original Jason, Daniela and Charlie find the car, and as they drive away they are shot at by yet another Jason, who Jason hits with the car's bumper, killing him. Jason realizes he was wrong about the lottery idea. "I thought there was a way to fix this." They pull a small leather bag out of the glove box.
Chapter 15:
An even more laughably implausible scene: They go back to the original site of the quantum superpositioning box, but there are already several Jason's there, early, waiting for the lottery. Daniela tells them all, "Charlie and I are going into the box with this man." Another of the Jasons says, "Let them pass. All of you." Despite half the book being filled with dozens of these quantum Jasons willing to maim, kill and torture each other in order to get to be in the "best" universe with Daniela and Charlie, somehow this particular grouping of Jasons is docile enough to permit them to pass. Charlie, Daniela and the "real" Jason walk into the box and close the door, inject the compound, and then reopen the door into a new universe. They walk through.