The Heart Broke In

By James MeekFarrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2012Harry Comrie, the head of a British cancer institute in The Heart Broke In, James Meek’s sprawling, multi-family epic of scientists and pop stars, is disillusioned. “We’ve got too many research groups,” he complains, hungover, after receiving a terminal diagnosis of his own. “We’re supposed to be curing cancer here and all we do is screw around seeing who can create the most fucked-up mouse.”Even after reading that line about a hundred times, I still find it extraordinarily funny, though I admit I’m probably Meek’s dream audience. A novelist, editor, and general lover of literature by night, by day I work at an immigration law firm, where I write green card applications for real-life cancer researchers who make a living creating fucked-up mice. I’ve had so many fucked-up mice clients I rarely write the fucked-up mice paragraphs anymore; I just adapt them from one of my numerous previous cases—and Harry’s assessment of contemporary cancer research rings very true.Still, I imagine most other people would enjoy reading about Harry, too, during his anti-murine tirade and anon. He’s lively; well rendered, despite his occasionally wooden dialogue. Archetypal without being a cliché. He genuinely feels like he could be your jovial uncle or doctor or boss—so jovial that even as his cancer takes hold and his treatment progresses, he can’t help but see “the potential for comedy”: he orders his own headstone, with the epitaph “HARRY COMRIE, MEDICAL RESEARCHER / IT WORKED IN MICE.” And even when he has second thoughts and calls the mason’s yard to renege, it’s “half -hoping they’d say, ‘Well, it’s not set in stone. Oh no, it is.’”This sort of gentle character building is even more admirable when you consider that, in the book’s grand scheme, Harry is a bit player, serving mainly as support for the novel’s leads (of which more presently). And while he certainly raises interesting intellectual questions—like, how sensible is it to pour so much funding into research that 99% of the time yields only Frankenmice?—these are only secondary to his more important role in exploring the book’s larger theme: offensive capitalist bullshit.That theme is not, perhaps, obvious from the outset. Indeed, from the outset you might rightly wonder how anything could tie together the novel’s many moving parts. Two of the book’s three leads, for instance, are exploring other scientific research of their own: Harry’s nephew Alex discovers a molecular process that promises a potential cure for aging, thereby launching himself into scientific stardom. Meanwhile his love interest, Bec, turns herself into a walking petri dish in order to test the anti-malarial properties of a rare African parasite. On top of that there’s Harry’s hyper-religious son, who has kept the grandchildren from Harry for most of their lives; there’s Dougie, another of Harry’s nephews—Alex’s brother—who has become a somewhat raffish postman with a gambling problem. There’s even a former IRA member who’s given up murder for poetry.And then there’s the third of the book’s main characters: Bec’s brother, Ritchie Shepherd, a best-selling musician-turned-TV producer, a father of two, and a model member of the nouveau riche. He has a private recording studio at his gated country mansion, and membership at multiple gentlemen’s clubs in the city—and while his wife and kids are busy picking fruit in the orchard on his grounds, he keeps an apartment in London for his mistress, upon whom he lavishes expensive gifts.This may sound like a stale formula, especially as an opening for Meek’s novel, but Ritche’s story is for much of the book its most gut-wrenching. His mistress in those early chapters is a fifteen-year-old girl; her inevitable boredom with him an equally inevitable path to the tabloids. And while this may sounds formulaic too, the editor of the slimiest tabloid in the novel’s London, Val Oatman, also happens to be Bec’s recently jilted and vengeful fiancé—and his discovery of Ritchie’s infidelity leads to an escalating saga of emotional blackmail from which it’s difficult to turn away.Anyway, you can see how a reader might struggle to immediately find a throughline in all this, even as Meek kneads together the various parts, massaging a lifelike texture from his principals and their interactions. Bec and Alex’s courtship lurches forward gradually, even though Alex’s enthusiasm is mostly unreciprocated; Harry’s jollity inexorably wanes; Ritchie’s guilt and dread and desperation simmer deliciously both at his work and in his home life; and the gambling postman, without wanting to give too much away, embarks on yet another self-destructive compulsion. (The Irish murderer-poet, if you’re wondering, was responsible for the death of Ritchie and Bec’s father many years earlier, and Ritchie is out to expand his own career by filming a forgiving documentary about him. It’s probably the book’s most forgettable thread.)Eventually, though, out of that morass, something larger begins to emerge. It’s a testament to the book’s range (or perhaps a symptom of it, if you find epics like this tiresome) that there has been little agreement among critics on what that larger thing is. The Los Angeles Review of Books described it as “a novel about sex”; Kirkus says it’s “about atheism, morality and religion.” Probably my favorite précis comes from the Telegraph, which called it “a blackly comic study of human weakness and narcissism.” And my own contribution to the chorus, as I’ve already said, is that if there’s one thing the book is “about” it’s the insidious and far-reaching effect of money and economic thinking on… Well, everything else.This is most clear in the shadowy organization that emerges in the book’s second half: the Moral Foundation. Run by the aforementioned slimy tabloid editor Val Oatman, now fired, the Moral Foundation has the relatively simple remit of publishing dirt about “prominent people” on its website. The twist is that those prominent people are given the chance ahead of time, via anonymous phonecall, to spare themselves; all they have to do is inform on another prominent person, and their own skeletons will remain forever in the closet. Mostly this is an elaborate smokescreen for Oatman to use what he has on Ritchie to get something damning about Bec—who Oatman’s still keen to publicly humiliate in retribution for calling off their engagement. And boy, does Ritchie have something damning on her—on Alex too, for that matter—though again, I won’t spoil anything by telling you what it is, or whether Ritchie spills.While this gripping ethical drama is doubtless what inspires critics to contend that the book is about morality, or about human weakness and narcissism, it’s hard not to also read it as equally concerned with the power of money. “Prominent people” is essentially shorthand for “rich people,” because they’re the ones who most frequently attract the tabloids’ glare, in the novel and in real life. And surely it’s no coincidence that the Moral Foundation’s most prized mark is named Ritchie, or that the novel starts with descriptions of Ritchie’s affluence, or that it’s his decisions that ultimately have the greatest repercussions.No, Meek clearly wants Ritchie and his wealth—and his abuses of that wealth—on our minds, regardless of whether he’s on the page, because that lets him raise questions like: why are things like this? Why do we allow the rich and powerful to be so rich and powerful, even when we suspect them of endemic moral failings, while the principled remain so poor? Why should pop stars like Ritchie live so comfortably, while the scientists out there, like Bec and Alex, work so hard that they sleep at the office half the time—and yet still rely on the support of others just to keep a roof over their heads? (It’s worth noting, by the way, that even Bec and Alex are considerably better off than the army of real-world postdocs who these days do most of cancer research’s gruntwork, and whose median salary, at $42,000, is a little less than a plumber’s.)Of course, it’s an oversimplification to boil issues like this down to the immoral rich versus the honorable poor; there are doubtless many virtuous pop stars and just as many immoral wage slaves. And Meek, to his credit, gives us a complex cast, with characters both rich and unimpeachable, poor and corrupt. Yet that initial, black-and-white hermeneutic still feels, intuitively, the most correct. Even Ritchie succumbs to it:

Ritchie was glad people like Alex existed, even if his own circumstances didn’t allow him to be as good a person as his friend, as good a person as he would like to be. Ritchie felt he, Ritchie, had the misfortune to know the reality of life, which was that people were always trying to fuck you over, and sometimes you had to fuck them back. He found it comforting to know that there were good, hardworking, self-sacrificing geniuses like Alex out there…. Ritchie saw the limits of Alex’s means as the price he paid for the great honor of being virtuous, and his own success as compensation for being punished with the necessity to lie and deceive.

This seems, at first blush, like a particularly cynical formulation: the rich are deceitful, and rewarded with the freedom to misbehave, so that the truly virtuous can keep on fucking up mice. But who knows? Maybe the pop stars—and all the other wealthy people out there, the hedge fund managers and the software moguls and so on—would identify. After all, it doesn’t sound too far from standard free market dogma: let the rich do what they want, and the greater social good will come. That social good seems clear enough in Meek’s novel, too, where despite self-sacrifice—Bec’s voluntary parasite and long nights at the lab, Alex’s postponing children in an earlier relationship—the virtuous seem content, even as they muddle through their unglamorous but important work:

Alex flew over the nucleus of a human cell, looking up along the shafts of microtubules that vaulted towards the distant, quivering sphere enclosing the cytoplasmic ocean, turning back to see the curving ridges of the Golgi apparatus release flocks of glittering proteins, each closing in on itself, like millions of open hands curling into fists. He delved inside them and each protein revealed itself as a form on the cusp of life and chemistry, a device of exquisite intricacy and precision, and he counted the revolutions of the atoms as they twisted and aggregated, key biting key biting key… He sat hunched…a pen in his left hand, making sharp, short stokes that didn’t look like writing. With his right hand he lifted, turned, and rearranged a set of objects on the desk: a child’s watering can, a toy rooster, a pair of interlocking wooden rings, an egg timer, a clockwork dolphin. Scattered in front of him, around and on top of his computer keyboard, were the brightly colored spheres and metal rods of a molecular modeling kit.He came to the surface, singing a transition jingle he didn’t know he sang.

Scenes like this provide a nice balance to Ritchie’s hedonistic lifestyle; they remind us that even poorly paid work can still be richly satisfying. Indeed, reading about Alex and Bec, those rich versus poor thoughts that Meek puts in Ritchie’s head begin to seem more suspect. Perhaps the real offensive capitalist bullshit we’re meant to clock here is not that pop stars get paid more than scientists, but that we so blithely reduce people to their salaries in the first place. I mean, what difference does it make how much a cancer researcher gets paid? Isn’t the important thing that you feel happy and fulfilled and human, regardless of how much is in your bank account?I should point out that, strictly speaking, I’m going a little beyond the confines of Meek’s novel, here. But that, I think, is the sign of a great piece of fiction, and certainly among The Heart Broke In’s greatest strengths: even as you care about the characters and get caught up in the story, you can’t help but ponder these larger issues. Like, if we are going to champion the importance of feeling human and fulfilled, is all the anti-wealth rhetoric informing our politics these days—informing my own, inveterate lefty interpretation of Meek’s book, even—maybe a little bit hypocritical? Sure, it’s easy to look at vast personal wealth and chalk it up to greed, or to Ritchie’s grand Faustian bargain, or to some kind of moral failing. Yet despite Ritchie’s occasional misgivings, he seems to gain the same contentment from the act of making money itself that Bec and Alex do from their research—and I presume the same must be true for most real-life pop stars, or hedge fund managers or whoever. So why should their wealth deserve so much scorn, if earning it is what makes them feel human? If we’re asking them to give more thought to the humanity of the poor, don’t we owe them the same courtesy?Indeed, even as Meek’s authorial cranes grow admittedly somewhat creaky, swinging into place the scaffolding for the Moral Foundation’s final coup, it’s striking how well his densely plotted scenarios unveil the tone-deafness in our distinctions between haves and have-nots. Why do we care so much that the rich get—and get away with—so much more than the poor? The better question, surely, is why we’re so obsessed with who “deserves” what in the first place. Because it’s not just the Moral Foundation, is it? The subject of any tabloid headline, any whispered gossip, any religious parable, is ultimately the same; even the supposedly righteous halls of scientific research echo daily with rumors of scandal and deception. Who’s getting more than their share? Who’s not playing fairly? Who’s getting away with what?This, to me, is Meek’s biggest success: making us really see how deep these questions run in our thinking and in our culture. While Ritchie and Alex and Bec all despair, as the book draws to a close, that their sins will be revealed, we grasp where the offensive capitalist bullshit really lurks. We understand, suddenly, that as long as we’re all chasing each other down or turning each other in or reaming each other out for getting away with “too much”—a capitalist concept if ever there was one—we’re not focusing on the right problems; we’re fretting over the consequences of our social and economic systems, systems that are as unbalanced and fucked-up as any cancer research mouse, instead of trying to change their causes.And when finally all of the characters settle into their respective endings, Meek seems to offer a glimmer of something like guidance. The problem is not—has never been—that some people earn more than their fair share of money, or fame, or whatever. The problem, rather, is that these once-upon-a-time means to a worthwhile, happy life have since become dangerous, all-encompassing ends. And until we undo that shift, stop caring about just desserts and start caring about whether we’re actually content with how we each live, as individuals, well—the offensive capitalist bullshit Meek so deftly reveals will still be there long after our bank accounts are gone.____Andrew Ladd is the blog editor at Ploughshares. His first novel, What Ends, won the AWP 2012 Prize in the Novel and will be published in January 2014 by New Issues Press, while his shorter work has also appeared in Apalachee Review, CICADA, Memoir Journal, and The Rumpus, among others.