Black Cat, January 2012
It seems out of order, at the beginning of this review, to state that Ryan Boudinot, who writes about film for The Rumpus, is my new favorite author, but his second novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife, reads a bit like a genetic graft between David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System and Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. Blueprints of the Afterlife is a book that I will unequivocally press into the hands of any who approach me for a recommendation in 2012, for between its covers Boudinot lets loose a cast of brilliantly colorful characters acting across a bizarre chain of events to tell the story about how the world ends.
Woo-jin Kan
Open onto a post-apocalyptic tableau – a deserted, garbage flecked airstrip in the Pacific Northwest where 25-year-old championship dishwasher Woo-jin Kan makes his way home from his job at Il Italian Joint, his primary point of concern (up until his discovery of the dead girl) being whether to eat the three quarters of a hamburger and gravy fries he rescued from the trash at work or whether to bring it home to his foster sister, Patsy, a 400-pound behemoth and a pharmer, who while usurping the couch in their shared trailer, grows tissues on her body for the U.S. government.
It seems out of order, at the beginning of this review, to state that Ryan Boudinot, who writes about film for The Rumpus, is my new favorite author, but his second novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife, reads a bit like a genetic graft between David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System and Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. Blueprints of the Afterlife is a book that I will unequivocally press into the hands of any who approach me for a recommendation in 2012, for between its covers Boudinot lets loose a cast of brilliantly colorful characters acting across a bizarre chain of events to tell the story about how the world ends.
Woo-jin Kan
Open onto a post-apocalyptic tableau – a deserted, garbage flecked airstrip in the Pacific Northwest where 25-year-old championship dishwasher Woo-jin Kan makes his way home from his job at Il Italian Joint, his primary point of concern (up until his discovery of the dead girl) being whether to eat the three quarters of a hamburger and gravy fries he rescued from the trash at work or whether to bring it home to his foster sister, Patsy, a 400-pound behemoth and a pharmer, who while usurping the couch in their shared trailer, grows tissues on her body for the U.S. government.
Despite the fact that Patsy’s general heft, demeanor, and all around likableness cause her to most closely resemble Jabba the Hut, Woo-jin cares very much for his foster sister. In fact, he cares deeply for everyone, so deeply in fact that he is prone to epileptic fits of empathy. It is during one of these, that he enters a vision in which his future self tells him he has to write a book about how to love people, one of the few books that will be read by The Last Dude, who assembles rocks in the Arizona desert to spell out a message explaining why humans went extinct.
Abby Fogg
Abby Fogg is a digital archivist who is hired to go to the estate of the aging performer Kylie Asparagus to retrieve and restore a lost interview concerning Nick Fedderly, the inventor of a device that may or may not have been the catalyst for the age of Fucked Up Shit (FUS) and, subsequently, the end of the world. Abby, as of yet, is blissfully unaware that this career opportunity, along with everything else that has occurred in her life since she first met him college, has been minutely engineered by her boyfriend Rocco, hacked via the Bionet, the next phase of the Internet in which our entire nervous systems are available online.
Neethan F. Jordan
It's difficult to describe just how over-the-top the character of Neethan F. Jordan, an actor who plays Dr. Uri Borden on the hit television series, Stella Artaud: Newman Assasin, is without invoking Boudinot's own description:
Abby Fogg
Abby Fogg is a digital archivist who is hired to go to the estate of the aging performer Kylie Asparagus to retrieve and restore a lost interview concerning Nick Fedderly, the inventor of a device that may or may not have been the catalyst for the age of Fucked Up Shit (FUS) and, subsequently, the end of the world. Abby, as of yet, is blissfully unaware that this career opportunity, along with everything else that has occurred in her life since she first met him college, has been minutely engineered by her boyfriend Rocco, hacked via the Bionet, the next phase of the Internet in which our entire nervous systems are available online.
Neethan F. Jordan
It's difficult to describe just how over-the-top the character of Neethan F. Jordan, an actor who plays Dr. Uri Borden on the hit television series, Stella Artaud: Newman Assasin, is without invoking Boudinot's own description:
“Neethan models a pair of black sunglasses, prototypes from his line. His face tingles from a facial. Two Altoids effervesce on his tongue. The product holding his hair in a swept-back wave is composed of organic materials harvested from ten countries, six of them war zones. Black pants, jacket, leather shoes crafted by hand in a little-known region of Italy where livestock still wander dirt roads, a white starched shirt with the top button unbuttoned. Neethan is a tall dude, six-eight, and watching him come out of a limo is like watching a cleverly designed Japanese toy robot arachnid emerge from a box…”
The F. stands for exactly what you think it does.
Luke Piper
Interspersed throughout Blueprints of the Afterlife are the recorded interviews with Luke Piper, Nick Fedderly’s childhood best friend, whose life pre-dates the FUS and who very well may be partially responsible for its onset. These are the very interviews that Abby is purportedly sent to Victoria to recover, interviews in which Luke recounts his childhood and Nick’s disappearance into the shadowy Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential.
These few are primary characters in a psychedelic cast that, along with a complex layering of story, will make you laugh out loud, all the while challenging your faculties with the task of piecing together Boudinot’s puzzle. There are androids and clones, wee software development monks, and a giant celestial head; there is a marauding sentient glacier that wipes out the major cities in North America; and there is a exact replica of Manhattan emerging in Puget Sound.
Ridiculously funny (and at times, disturbing), Blueprints of the Afterlife is a thematically strong work of fiction that skewers our culture of conspicuous consumption and warns against technology’s continued encroachment into our personal lives. As an added bonus, it happens to be written by Ryan Boudinot, who could probably author a hot water heater’s technical manual that would keep me transfixed from start to finish.
The F. stands for exactly what you think it does.
Luke Piper
Interspersed throughout Blueprints of the Afterlife are the recorded interviews with Luke Piper, Nick Fedderly’s childhood best friend, whose life pre-dates the FUS and who very well may be partially responsible for its onset. These are the very interviews that Abby is purportedly sent to Victoria to recover, interviews in which Luke recounts his childhood and Nick’s disappearance into the shadowy Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential.
These few are primary characters in a psychedelic cast that, along with a complex layering of story, will make you laugh out loud, all the while challenging your faculties with the task of piecing together Boudinot’s puzzle. There are androids and clones, wee software development monks, and a giant celestial head; there is a marauding sentient glacier that wipes out the major cities in North America; and there is a exact replica of Manhattan emerging in Puget Sound.
Ridiculously funny (and at times, disturbing), Blueprints of the Afterlife is a thematically strong work of fiction that skewers our culture of conspicuous consumption and warns against technology’s continued encroachment into our personal lives. As an added bonus, it happens to be written by Ryan Boudinot, who could probably author a hot water heater’s technical manual that would keep me transfixed from start to finish.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.
