The High Heaven

Read to be inspired to think more about the moon.

The High Heaven follows the life of a mysterious figure named Izzy from her childhood during the Cold War to her adulthood in the twenty-first century. The book is as much about her as it is about the deserts, ranches, diners, and motels that she lives and works in throughout New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana. You can easily read it as a love letter to the American South and Southwest, though I'd still say the book has a character driven narrative. Izzy's story, told almost as a series of several episodes (or "arcs"), is somber, melancholy, and sometimes tragic, but there's also hope, humor, and happiness sprinkled in there. After escaping a cult based around UFOs, she's orphaned young, and any stability she finds doesn't last. She lives a transient and impoverished life. With no identification papers, her existence is somewhat untethered, but she also knows the land extremely well, so she's still fundamentally tethered to it. Even when she hits rock bottom, you can't help but believe she'll be resourceful enough to figure out how to survive.

Izzy and the people she meets over the course of her life are likeable as characters, and I had no trouble rooting for them. What I liked most about them is that they feel very realistic. It's the type of fiction that feels true. I was able to shed whatever distance I normally hold between stories and real life. The book is explicitly aware of this distance, and characters wrestle with it all the time. Much of the early chapters are set during the Vietnam War, and nobody fully trusts what they're being told by the government or by anyone else. Nobody even trusts their senses. All pieces of media are inaccurate, and one character describes stories as manufactured. As the decades pass by, nihilism increasingly creeps in. Direct experience with reality feels impossible, but the The High Heaven nevertheless tries so hard to cut through it all. It does its best to offer readers direct experience with these characters by making them feel vivid, raw, tangible, and realistic. They're fictional, but they still sincerely represent something real.

One important early scene regarding the distance between fact and fiction is one in which Izzy is taught a trick to help her talk about tough topics. Instead of admitting to being scared or sad, she is told to act as though the moon is the one with these feelings. The moon is afraid. The moon is sad. The moon is an orphan. The moon escaped a cult. The moon has light leaking out of her eyes for some reason. It distances Izzy from her trauma, which is supposed to make things easier to talk about. However, a few chapters later, NASA starts making plans to send people to the moon. The moon isn't so distant anymore.

Izzy is then understandably drawn to any astronaut clips she can watch on television. The book spends a lot of page time on what starts as Izzy's casual fascination with moon landings, but soon becomes something more akin to an eccentric obsession. The moon ends up serving as one of many metaphors used to explore themes around unknowability and fact versus fiction. When ideas around knowledge and knowability are introduced (usually in the context of religion, the speed of light and information, the shape of the universe, fortunetellers, perception-altering drugs, and postmodern skepticism), the point isn't merely to wax philosophical about subjectivity versus objectivity. While I do think the book should appeal to readers who like philosophy, the focus is (usually) more on seeing how these ideas impact characters. Do they understand themselves and each other? Do they communicate authentically and meaningfully? When are they drawn to the truth? When are they drawn to myth?

For me, exploring these questions was an absolute pleasure. I adored almost everything about this book. It has just the right amount of literary experimentation for my taste. The author is playing around with the rules of genre and grammar, but it doesn't feels pointless, overdone, or needlessly challenging. If something doesn't need to be complex, it's kept simple. When things do get complex, it never becomes masturbatory (or -- worse -- incoherent). It just forced me to read more slowly than I otherwise would have, which is a good thing here. It's a gripping story, but it's also a powerful one that deserves not to be finished in a single sitting. I wanted to linger as long as I could with Izzy, and I did.

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