nonfiction
Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality, by Jonathan Weiner, $27.99 Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jonathan Weiner surveys the field of aging science as if from a mountaintop: He’s intrigued, yet detached and skeptical, frequently digressing from science to discuss how religions and cultures have dealt with the problem of mortality and to ponder whether humans’ lust for ever-longer lives is a good thing.
Weiner usually structures his books around the work and ideas of individual scientists, and for this one he has chosen Aubrey de Grey, a brilliant but eccentric Cambridge computer scientist who has become an acknowledged leader in devising strategies to vanquish aging.
As a protagonist, de Grey is unappealing: He’s good at seeing the big picture, but he’s described as an arrogant man who takes pleasure only in working, swilling beer and punting on the River Cam.
Weiner uses his encounters with de Grey to lay out scientists’ current theories about why we age. Aging is not a biological constant: Some organisms (hydras and sponges, for example) seem to be virtually immortal, and even some closely related groups of animals (such as bats and mice) have dramatically different lifespans.
Human aging stems from progressive damage to our cells and their DNA — caused by threats from within, such as dangerous byproducts of metabolic reactions, and from without, such as exposure to radiation or mutagenic chemicals. It’s also thought to result from inherited mutations that have persisted in our genomes because they improve our reproductive success, but take a toll in later life.
De Grey simplifies aging to a list of the “deadly things” that eventually happen to everyone: the accumulation of junk inside and outside cells, harmful mutations, a loss of certain crucial cells and an oversupply of others, and the progressive cross-linking of molecules in connective tissue that leads to wrinkled skin, stiff tissues and organ damage. Fix those problems, he argues, and a human being could live to be 1,000.
The past two centuries have already seen a doubling of average life expectancy, with most of the progress in the past 50 years coming from improvements in the lives of older adults. “The number of centenarians on the planet has more or less doubled with every decade since 1960,” Weiner notes. Longer lifespans in developed countries are strongly associated with lower birth rates, leading to changes in population makeup and raising questions about the impact on national economies.
As Weiner writes, “No other scientific program raises so many enormous and imponderable questions, and they are so blithely dismissed by the engineers who would build the dam in the valley of the shadow of death.”
fiction
Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray, $28 Let’s get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray’s dazzling new novel, “Skippy Dies,” . . . Skippy dies.
If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it’s nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book. Recently named to the Man Booker Prize long list, “Skippy Dies” is an epic crafted around, of all things, a pack of 14-year-old boys. It’s the “Moby-Dick” of Irish prep schools.
The school in question is Dublin’s venerable Seabrook College (the equivalent of a private American high school), a 140-year-old institution whose social dynamics make “Lord of the Flies” seem like “Gilligan’s Island.” Its halls are a maze of bullying, name-calling, alcohol and drug use, sexual obsession and predation. And that’s just the faculty.
Our hero is one Daniel “Skippy” Juster, a slight, slightly disturbed second-year whose sudden collapse in the midst of a doughnut-eating contest forms the book’s central mystery. Imagine Harry Potter dying at Hogwarts early on, and you’ve got a bead on the dark heart of this comic novel.
Murray gives us a real villain, too, in the junior sociopath Carl, who, with his pal Barry, shakes down little kids for their ADHD medicine to sell to girls as diet pills. When Carl becomes Skippy’s rival for the affections of a vacant, Frisbee-tossing cutie named Lori, the danger is real, the result chilling.
The mixture of tones is the book’s true triumph, oscillating the banal with the sublime, the silly with the terrifying, the sweet with the tragic. In short, it’s like childhood. In short, like life.
The book’s refrain — that we never really outgrow being lovesick, awkward, bullying children — isn’t exactly breaking news, but it’s never been truer.
