EXILE FROM EDEN

A grotesque, post-apocalyptic exploration of story, reality, and adolescent boyhood.

Sixteen years after the end of Grasshopper Jungle (2014), when the Midwest was decimated by an apocalypse of 10-foot praying mantises, a handful of survivors are living in an underground bunker in Iowa. Sixteen-year-old Arek, born in the bunker, is increasingly feeling stifled, particularly by his grandmother, the “SPEAKER OF LAWS in the hole,” and his mother, whose “sadness and anger became a stormy ocean inside the hole, drowning me.” He’s in love with and lusts after his only peer, biracial (Chinese/white) Amelie Sing Brees. When his fathers, Austin and Robby, venture aboveground and don’t return, Arek is determined to seize the moment to explore the wider world and discover what has happened. Arek’s first-person narrative is an intentionally crafted meditation on art, truth, reality, reproduction (both abstract and biological), and meaning-making. The only brown character falls into disturbingly racist tropes: a 12-year-old boy named Breakfast who is “completely wild,” constantly “scratch[ing] his balls,” obsessed with money, hates wearing clothes, and has “wild dreadlocks.” Breakfast’s companion is a chimpanzee named Olive, whom Breakfast is convinced is just a very hairy human girl who never talks. Smith’s (The Size of the Truth, 2019, etc.) trademark portrayal of women characters, which at its most generous can be described as a lack of attention, continues here.

“I am my father’s son,” the protagonist notes early on; this couldn’t be truer—for better and, quite arguably, for worse.