Book Review: The Postmortal

The last time I did one of these book reviews, I added that I would write up my review of The Postmortal the next day. Then school had to start and there went all of my free time, even though these things don't take all that long to bang out.

Anyways....The Postmortal.

This book is about as opposite as Drew Magary's first book: Men With Balls, which is a how-to guide of being a professional athlete. It is full of the humor that one would be used to from reading his posts at "Deadspin" or elsewhere on the Internet. And yet, there's nary a poop joke or dick joke to be found in The Postmortal, at least none that I can remember since I read the book two months ago.

This novel deals with a hypothetical, and a major one at that. What if science could make you more or less immortal. You take a shot and never age. Old age cannot kill you. Your body won't break down. Other things can kill you, but never your own body. "The Cure" as it is called is highly controversial, and even after it is legalized many fight against its use. Magary takes political imagry of today and puts it into his fictional story, adding a bit of realism to the story that sometimes falls flat. (Things get a bit too coincidental for me at times in the book).

One review I read took up a point that Magary briefly addresses the effect such technology would have on sports records. The passage the reviewer references is a one-sentence blip in a "links round up" (the book reads as if it was someone's blog) about the baseball home run record falling. This, complains the reviewer, is expected. Magary is a sports guy, why wouldn't he throw in this little bit? (Never mind that anyone who reads Kissing Suzy Kolber knows that Magary does not care for baseball in the least).

I actually think that this little blip added a bit of world-building to the novel. Due to its nature, the story doesn't really allow for much more than glimpses into the rest of the world. There are the wars in Russia and a crisis or two mentioned, but nothing is ever truly flushed out.

If the world of the Postmortal is something Magary wants to return to for a future book, taking the sports aspect could be a fun way to go. Maybe he wished to avoid it, given all the controversy surrounding steroids, but a sports science fiction book, something that blends Magary's first two novels together, could be a fun read.