THE DEFINITIONS

A group of patients at an isolated rehabilitation center work to recover language and memory after having had them wiped out by a mysterious virus.

At the beginning of Greene’s slim novel, the nameless protagonist has passed through a required period of quarantine and is taking medications to counteract the effects of a virus that neurologically ravages its hosts. The narrator—telling events retrospectively from a future readers are eager to see arrive—is a resident of what is called only “the Center” and doesn’t remember anything about the past. The goal is that the residents will eventually, through a regime of instruction and socialization, “graduate” and re-acclimate to an outside world they are assured exists. Given names from “cartridges” they watch of old sitcoms (there are numerous patients called “Joey” and “Chandler”), the residents take courses like “Grammar,” “Politeness,” “The History of the Twenty-first Century: A Story of Progress,” and “Art.” But how can they relearn humanity and society without the benefit of a narrative on which to draw? It is this notion around which Greene forms the book’s core. “It had been explained to us in Orientation: the world was a hand and language was a glove,” notes the protagonist. But what happens when the glove does not fit—and when the world has shrunk to the size of a fenced-in facility? Greene’s novel belongs to a lyrical tradition in the vein of Never Let Me Go, but eschews typical worldbuilding or backstory. These gaps create an eerie effect, but they allow for characters who themselves are blank slates of identity and meaning, while focusing less on plot than on moments of symbolic power that show how language shapes us, our relationships, and our sense of the world.

An elliptical and unsettling entry into the canon of contemporary dystopias.