In the last several years, I have found myself unable to read fiction with my old wide-ranging zeal. Science fiction, in particular, wears on me, and I stop after a few sentences.

Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson, is an exception. This book grabbed me from the beginning, and, had I not lost track of it in the mess of my office, and then in the mess of my bedroom, I would have read it immediately upon purchase, in as close to one sitting as possible. As it is, it's taken me many months to read. (I've since cleaned up my bedroom, and I'm cleaning my office as I move to the room next door.)

It is a first-person narrative, but one of those with plenty of description and opinion, and one that builds up its story. In structure, it most resembles (or so I say in dim memory) Gore Vidal's Kalki. But this book is far superior to that.

And, though billed as literary fiction, and obviously written at a high level, this book cannot help but be called science fiction. It is more science fictional than most books so labelled, for here we are not only dealing with an imagined future, but a science is focused on as a living, breathing human enterprise, and the focus of that science provides the major plot points.

The science? Anthropology. The focus? The Clovis hunters, who (may have) eradicated the bulk of the large mammals of the North American continent. A Clovis discovery by the narrator's star pupil turns into something almost farcical, and then horrific. The general tone of the novel is satirical.

This is one of the better end-of-the-world stories I've read. It is one of the best novels I've read in some time.

The title is meant, I think, to be evocative, not literal. Towards the end there is something said about parasites:

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.

Interesting, but not glorious. One might say that's the author's view of humanity: interesting, but not glorious.

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