The Revelations is a bad book by a writer I like and respect. While well-written, the plot is nearly nonexistent, and the main book is set largely between the ears of Kierk Suren and Carmen Green, two deeply unlikable leads who serve more as fantasies of Ubermenschen than they do actual human beings. The author and buzz around it primed me to expect a deep, complex work, so much so that, during the entire read, I felt as though there would be some twist, some point at which the glaring flaws in the text would turn out to be a sort of grand trick, and I would lean back in my chair, delighted at having been taken along for the ride.
That did not happen. Though I’m left at the end with thoughts and puzzles to ponder, I’m afraid the novel might just be the product of a talented writer without much of an eye for character or plot.
The Revelations follows Kierk, Carmen and their colleagues, researchers who have just been accepted to a prestigious fellowship to study consciousness. A few days into the program, one of the fellows is crushed by a subway train after a night of drinking, and Kierk and Carmen suspect foul play, half-heartedly playing detective in an attempt to find the killer.
But the plot doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t matter. The ‘mystery’ never resolves; it never even advances. There’s maybe a dozen scenes about it, but the characters don’t find anything of significance, and no murderer is ever found. The ostensible central conflict is more or less dropped halfway through, and never returned to.
The book is full of these half baked plot elements. Early in the novel, we learn that the university the academics are working at has created replicas of each of their brains, and is studying them. Nothing ever comes of this. Early on, most of the other academics have point of view chapters that introduce their characters and their own conflicts (e.g. one of the academics is having an affair). These are not resolved, either. There’s a sinister figure who menaces Carmen for a bit, then vanishes. And Kierk has strange, bloody visions that ultimately serve no purpose.
So what is this book about? Most of the novel is given over to the banalities of collegiate office politics; Kierk and Carmen’s inevitable romance; and, most prominently, Kierk’s musings about life and consciousness. Indeed, most of the book is given over to Kierk’s internal life: each chapter details precisely how he awakes each morning and his mood, his internal struggles with ambition and self-loathing, and his thoughts on everything from running to ants.
Unfortunately, Kierk is detestable. In an early passage of the book, ruminating on the recurring mental state that caused him to slap and punch himself a few chapters earlier, Kierk notes that his “capacity for self-hatred is as expansive and powerful as his ego.” Kierk seems to think he’d be diagnosed with bi-polar disorder because of this, but his behavior throughout the book cleanly fits the model of a narcissist: cocky, entitled, obsessed with fantasies about ultimate success, enraged by criticism, and lacking empathy; all of which serves to mask a deep self hatred.
Kierk is arrogant cruel. Towards the beginning of the book, the new fellows go out for drinks. As they introduce themselves, Greg, explaining why he ended up in consciousness research after obtaining a doctorate in Computer Science, casually says, “the brain’s the most complex computer.” This causes Kierk to look at Greg “the way one might look at a hideously deformed child, pity and disgust warring on his face,” and berate Greg for his opinions, calling them “vacuous,” questioning his “ability to say anything,” interrupting him, and eventually exploding after a frustrated Greg snaps back in the same condescending tone Kierk has been using. Greg sinks into silence, and, after the group mocks and bullies him a few more times, leaves early. Ironically, it’s revealed in a later chapter that part of Kierk’s research involves simulating the brain using… a series of computers.
There’s a similar altercation later in the book, where Kierk starts yelling at a colleague over a theoretical disagreement in front of a nervous child who has asked them a question. He goes on to tell his colleague he could “crush his worldview with one hand tied behind [his] back,” then violently breaks down a folding table, presumably in an attempt to show off his perceived alpha male status.
Even Carmen, his supporter and eventual girlfriend, finds him unpleasant to be around: when alone, some of her notes feel “funny and dark and necessary all at once, but with Kierk here [they] suddenly seemed paranoid, ill-humored and vaguely pathetic.” Perhaps this is because Kierk “imparts this sense that all you have been doing in neuroscience is useless and pointless and it’s this contagious mood of depressive realism that can’t be shaken off.” He is the sort of person who reflexively tears other people down without even being aware he’s doing it.
Kierk is dismissive of any perceived challenge or slight, aggressively attacking people who are simply trying to help. At multiple points, a professor sits him down to discuss logistics or offer advice, and he treats genial suggestions as personal attacks: (n.b. The ellipses here are included in the text):
“Let me be frank. From what I’ve heard there’s a bit of a self-indulgence problem here. With you. And I’m not sure that it’s the best idea–”
“Let me explain…hmm…Take a book, for instance. Is there actually any meaning within the words themselves, or are they defined, given by, the reader? See, we know that words are just symbols, chicken-scratch. Look at text from a language you don’t know and the problem jumps into clear focus. It’s the consciousness of the reader that gives any meaning, any content, to the chicken-scratch. The problem of consciousness, interestingly, can be described in the same way. When we look at the chicken-scratch of neuronal firing patterns, what are we to read into them? If you see some neurons firing in, say, the medial temporal lobe, what are we to say about what they mean to the brain? Just because something responds reliably to an object or concept, does that mean it represents it? And most neurons in higher cortical areas don’t reliably respond to anything in particular. And if you say that they mean what they do because there is an interpreter of brain activity somewhere in the brain, well, then we are stuck in an infinite regress, because who gives that observer their internal content, and so on? Is there some universal author who draws across all systems in the universe the epistemic boundaries needed to give consciousness definite content? Does God fix consciousness in place? Some invisible author just makes shit up, assigns this here and that there…”
“I, umm…”
“... in other words: was it God who wrote these signs?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“That quote is originally from Goethe, of course, and then, later, that’s Boltzmann quoting Goethe. Boltzmann was already working on the physics of information way before anybody else was. He was quoting Goethe in respect to Maxwell’s meager and elegant four equations, which summarized so much of the physical world with so little that they seemed divine in origin…from scientist to writer to scientist…The quote is a beautiful analogy to the paradox…Was it God who wrong the signs in our skulls…Of course that was before he killed himself for his intellectual failures.”
“Who?”
“Boltzmann. Goethe, on the other hand, reconciled his genius with lived life.”
“……”
“...”
They avoid eye contact. The silence has grown long enough to be uncomfortable. Finally, Kierk, slapping his knees, stands and leans over the desk to shake Williams’ hand, which is returned with a surprisingly strong grip.
“Have we covered everything?” Kierk asks perfunctorily.
“Ah, I guess we have covered some things. Certainly.”
“Good.” Kierk turns to leave.
Kierk, gently chastised for self-indulgence, goes on a self-indulgent rant designed to overwhelm his advisor, then namedrops a bunch of philosophers to prove how smart and well-read he is. When the professor reacts with shocked confusion, Kierk condescends to him, then leaves.
All of this is because Kierk is incapable of believing that others have intelligent things to offer to the conversation. Every time another character mentions something he hadn’t considered it is “startling” or “surprising”--as if he had not considered that the other seven hand picked academics he works with could offer him something of value.
The most telling illustration of Kierk’s character is drawn early in the book, when the dead fellow’s mother reaches out in anguish from across the world, begging her son’s colleagues to tell her what happened to him. Kierk (the last person to have seen him) ignores the email and goes for a walk, finding that “Atif’s death had stoked his appetite,” and scribbling in his journal about becoming an “immanent being of pure empathy.” This is awfully ironic, given that he spends about three minutes considering his dead colleague's mother, and never attempts to respond to the email, telling his friends he “didn’t know what to say'--perhaps the only time in the book we see him at a loss for words.
In lieu of trying to offer comfort to a dead man’s mother, Kierk and Carmen convince themselves that Atif was murdered, and set themselves on a wild goose chase that allows them to center themselves as larger than life heroic figures honoring their friend’s memory by bringing his (nonexistent) killer to justice. This allows them to buttress their heroic self images while avoiding the difficult emotional task of offering some small comfort to a woman shattered by grief.
There’s part of me that wants to believe this is all intentional; that Kierk is supposed to be detestable. He mentions at the beginning of the book that his favorite novel is A Confederacy of Dunces; It’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but my memory is that there’s some parallels: a educated, emotionally stunted man lives his life thinking others are beneath him, believing himself to be set apart from humanity by virtue of his superior intellect. The joke in Confederacy of Dunces is that Ignatious is a grotesque, obese man who lives with his mother and spends a great deal of time playing with his tiny cock; the reader is invited to laugh at the disconnect between the main character’s worldview and actual reality.
That tension is not, generally, highlighted in The Revelations. The book occasionally hints at Kierk’s unlikability: multiple characters tell him that everyone thinks he’s an asshole, and, towards the end, another character realizes that “Kierk is only ever talking to himself.” And, despite his grand statements, Kierk never really seems to be making progress on anything, preferring to scribble myriad, disconnected thoughts in his journal to the difficult task of getting something concrete done. At the end of the novel, he’s accomplished nothing of substance, and flees the program, perhaps due to a subconscious realization that he has, in fact, squandered the opportunity.
But these nods to Kierk’s grotesqueness are outweighed by the many other times the book plays him straight. He’s incredible at playing pool, he is “charming as fuck,” and his physically perfect genius model girlfriend has a long passage where she muses about how he’s the perfect man:
There’s still a lingering contact high from Kierk…Maybe, Carmen thinks, she can blame evolution for making humans pair-bonding mostly-monogamous primates. After all, there’s Kierk’s intellect (showing an ability to plot on behalf of his genetic material), his broad shoulders (capable of brutish brawling with other male humans for dominance), his long legs and lack of adipose tissue (good for hunting, tracking, warfare), his combination of aggression and empathy (willing to commit violence to protect the genetic material he cherishes). And he makes her laugh (sexual market value).
These sorts of absurdly earnest laudatory descriptions abound, giving the reader the sense that we really are meant to admire Kierk as he bullies his way through the fellowship.
Perhaps in an attempt to make Kierk more sympathetic, the book spends more time on what it seems to see as his other flaws: his tendency towards self-hatred, and his fits of psychotic paranoia. The former seems intended to generate sympathy, and Kierk does seem genuinely tormented. But dislike of self is the fundamental trait of any bully. Kierk seems to have fallen into the flawed chain of reasoning that intelligent bullies who were bullied themselves are prone to: the people that abused me seemed powerful and confident. Ifeel insecure and helpless. Thus, Icannot be a bully: I am merely bravely speaking truth to the people around me.
The second flaw, his paranoia, feels tacked on. When the protagonist in House of Leaves fears being stalked by a murderous minotaur, we understand it as a symptom of isolation, heavy drug use, and a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia. It helps explain his obsession with Zampanos text, contrasts his disordered madness to Zampanos ordered insanity, and echos the impossible labyrinth of the Navidson house. In The Revelations, however, Kierk’s madness is largely unexplained, a quirk that arises from no discernable source. It feels more like a way to designate him as special and edgy, especially since it doesn’t seem to affect him at all; his many paranoid episodes could be completely cut from the book without affecting the rest of the text. They hold about the same importance as his idle thoughts as he runs.
Those idle thoughts make up a great deal of the book, poetic stream-of-consciousness ramblings, largely tangentially related to consciousness. There are some good lines in there: “To be cursed is to be drawn to something that vexes you to madness”, or “when a relationship dies, a whole language dies with it, just as private and unique as any endangered tongue spoken in the deep rain forest.” but most land with a thud: “Slowly a bibliophilic recrudescence takes place, a real resurrection. My soul, he thinks, has been untethered by so unorganized a library.” Pages and pages are given to passages like the following:
He’s reminded of the infinite theories of Adolf Lindenbaum’s work, who showed that Boolean operators could make a lattice out of the infinite set of all possible theories, all possible models, every thinkable thought of the world–the vast majority of which are wildly incorrect. Lindenbaum showed how to order (but not to search) this vast library, which holds all truths. Somewhere, lost in that tower of Babel, that library of Borges, was the theory of consciousness. The one and only correct theory an infinitesimal needle in an infinite haystack. To see a glimpse…It would fit in how many English words, how many sentences? Half a paragraph for those with the right vocabulary? Would it use information geometry? Thermodynamical work? Autopoietic symbol construction? Algorithmic complexity? Computation? Symbolic recursion? Stacking of hierarchical receptive fields all the way up to grandmother neurons? Quantum physics? Would any such theory give the tools necessary to describe exactly the inner life of the same Adolf Lindembaum on that beautiful summer day in LIthuania, 1941, as he was rounded up by Nazis along with hundreds of other Jewish intelligentsia, all marched under that cheerful sun to a place of deep ashy pits and faraway bird calls[…]”
This goes on for another half a page, and doesn’t reach any sort of meaningful conclusion. Similar intellectual masturbation fills most of the book, and most of it is about as interesting as the “what if my red is your green” sort of juvenile ruminations Kierk fondly remembers from being a child.
This is disheartening, as this seems to be the main point of the book: to provide interesting ideas about consciousness in a fictional framework. But the genuinely interesting insights are lost in the noise of navel-gazing and often feel similar to Kierk’s interactions with others: a Very Special Boy trying to dazzle rather than communicate.
This, for me, was the most disappointing aspect of the book. I often like fiction that inserts explicit philosophy, whether it's the lectures in Starship Troopers, Trouble on Triton’s musings on gender, or Infinite Jest’s wrestling with addiction. But, like the Socratic dialogues Kierk is fond of referencing, these often work because there’s a character who serves as the reader surrogate, asking intelligent questions, pushing back, and forcing the speaker to clarify what, exactly, they’re trying to say. Since Kierk refuses to engage with or persuade anyone who disagrees with him, the reader is left with his internal monologues, which read like manic entries in an intelligent person’s journal: perhaps true, but largely unconvincing and incomprehensible to anyone but the person that wrote them.
So what the hell is the point of this book? The plot is undeveloped and never resolves, and the musings on consciousness are rambling and difficult to parse. The book makes a half-hearted attempt at telling us: towards the end of the novel Kierk, reflecting on the events of the story, decides “really, this has been a love story all along.” Perhaps Kierk and Carmen’s relationship is intended to be the main throughline of the story. But that isn’t very compelling either. Their early interactions make it abundantly clear that the two will end up together: Carmen almost immediately falls deeply in love with Kierk, and the book really strains to emphasize how attracted the two are to each other, doing things like describing ordinary conversation as “flirtatious banter.” Yet, they don’t have much chemistry. Kierk mostly seems to like her because she’s hot (have I already mentioned she’s a physically perfect former model?) and awed by him. Carmen finds him attractive for the weirdly clinical evolutionary biological reasons quoted above. They caper around for a while before the inevitable happens and they hook up, at which point he rather sociopathically ignores her for several days, and convinces himself that if he gets into a relationship with her it will cause him to “lose himself and perhaps his genius…whatever little creative spark [he] has left will vanish into Carmen and [he] will again live a normal life.” Instead, he decides, the noble thing to do will be to pretend that he was just using her for sex, all the while “[carrying] his love in him like a secret stone, a hidden altar, an inexpressible heart, the last solid remnant of a body become a sprouting garden.” This would, perhaps, be an emotional passage if it had come before the two had hooked up; as is, it’s merely self-delusion justifying an old-fashioned pump and dump.
But The Revelations is a love story, so the two end up together after all. We see Carmen’s pain as Kierk ignores her while she’s getting death threats, but the book ends with the two of them making out on the roof, Carmen apologizing(!), and Kierk manipulating her into leaving the fellowship to run away with him to France. One gets the sense Kierk realizes this was a love story all along because, facing professional ruin, Carmen has become his consolation prize.
The Revelations doesn’t really succeed at any of its goals, which is frustrating in part because the underlying mechanics are fairly strong. Hoel writes well, and though I found the poetic sections turgid, his prose is efficient, descriptive, and clean. The action, when it occurs, is exciting and tight: there’s a description of a protest being broken up by police that conveys a sense of terror and confusion while remaining legible and human, ending with a touching mutual acknowledgement between an injured Kierk and an exhausted riot cop. The slices of lab life that we get to see through Kierk’s eyes are interesting as well – presumably drawn from Hoel’s own experience as a neuroscience researcher, they are full of evocative details, like the scent of lab samples mixed with someone’s lunch in a refrigerator. And, for all my complaints about the philosophical musings, the climactic revelation–that consciousness is the basis of science and thus cannot be observed properly by it–is interesting and insightful. It might be the best part of the book, but it’s largely self-contained, so I’m just going to reproduce it here and save anyone else the trouble of reading the whole thing (again, ellipses are in the text):
[T]he basic structure of formal systems, defined as a set of axioms and subsequent theorems, inherently means that one cannot derive the axioms of a formal system or formal method from within the system or method…axioms must always stand outside of it…And if one wished to ground all of science in a well-founded and formalized manner, that is, to construct hierarchically the great tree of knowledge Yggdrasil itself, one must build it on some implicit, long-unacknowledged set of axioms. And the ultimate of those, the basest most fundamental, the very root system, would have to consciousness, holding up the entire tree with its unjustifiable nature. Giving everything else its definitive form. And if the existence of consciousness, of observers, is one of the axioms of science them a science of consciousness would be the ultimate begging of the question, petito principii, a victim of the Munchausen trilemma, because consciousness can’t be justified using consciousness…just as if man is the measure of all things, then how to measure man?...For even great Yggdrasil cannot hold the weight of its roots upon its boughs.”
I have a lot of respect for Hoel, and so there’s some part of me that wants to extract some meaning from the book's tangle of loose ends:
Kierk, at one point, mentions an injury in his mouth that could reopen at any time and kill him, and, though it’s never referenced again, the beginning of the book, where he’s beaten by teenagers, suggests that perhaps that injury has reopened, and the rest of the novel is his fevered hallucinations before death.
Or maybe Kierk’s constant exhaustion and paranoia point to a fight club-style split personality: he’s the one who menaced Carmen with the mannequin, paints graffiti, vandalizes the lab, running everything from his secret hideout in the subway.
Or maybe the brains in jars, seemingly the largest red herring in the book, have some kind of obscure role: maybe the scientists are a bunch of clones created by DARPA, or simulated consciousnesses, or Bozeman brains.
Or maybe the ominous knocking at the end of the book, and the call to “wake up” is a nod to the beginning, where Kierk is sleeping in his car when his attackers knock on the window to wake him up, and the whole novel has been a dream.
Regrettably, even if there is some clever, hidden twist to the book that recontextualizes it, it’s still probably not worth reading. The Revelations is marred by weak plot, a deeply unlikable main character, and faux-deep musings throughout. Hoel’s ability still manages to shine through in places, but if you’re looking for something like House of Leaves, or Infinite Jest, it is probably a better use of your time to reread those works.