In Gregory Sherl’s anxious, offbeat first novel, “The Future for Curious People,” scientists have figured out how to glimpse the future by processing sensory information and memory. Great, you say, get my bookie on the line! Not so fast. The FCC has stepped in to make sure people don’t “broadcast futures that would infringe on commerce,” so the only thing you’re allowed to see is how your relationships will look about 15 years down the road.
That tremor you feel is Washington’s divorce lawyers shuddering.
Set in Baltimore, “The Future for Curious People” centers on Evelyn Shriner and Godfrey Burkes, two quirky 20-somethings. Evelyn glues flowers on her rain boots and works at a local library, where she invents new endings for literary classics she records for the blind. “I can save Anna Karenina,” she tells one character. Godfrey, meanwhile, works in an agency called the Department of Unclaimed Goods, which is as insipid as its name implies. He is, obviously, completely neurotic. “Can you wave wrong?” he worries.
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When the novel opens, Evelyn is just ending a relationship and Godfrey’s is on the rocks. The two cross paths at Dr. Chin’s Envisioning Services, where patients don metal helmets that transmit visions of their future to a television, “the kind of thing used to transfer brain waves from the hero to the villain,” Godfrey comments. Eventually, Evelyn and Godfrey envision their future with each other, and it looks beautiful. But can they work things out in the present to make that future their reality?
“The Future for Curious People” might fall flat for happily coupled readers. It occasionally ponders life’s complexity with wide-eyed, youthful earnestness. “What if every fork in the road is leading to the same conclusion?” Evelyn wonders. Some of the book’s zany moments get a little too cute, too. “There is champagne and beer in me,” Godfrey thinks to himself during a tough night. “If the two fought, which would win?”
The book is more likely to hit a nerve with adrift 20-somethings who, like Evelyn and Godfrey, pin their hopes on the possibility that life will settle down at some point.
“I sell comfort,” Dr. Chin tells Godfrey. “And it doesn’t matter what future I show them because all they really want to hear is, ‘No, it’s not always going to be like this.’”
Wilwol is a writer in Washington.
THE FUTURE FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
By Gregory Sherl
Algonquin. 320 pp. Paperback. $14.95
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