Parasites Like Us by Adam Johnson

Parasites Like Us Reviews

• 
  Erin

  Dear Mr. Johnson,
  
  Please end the world more quickly in your next book. It turns out you are way more interesting when you're destroying humanity. It took us about five pages to realize how lame Hank was. Then you kept establishing that fact for half the book. Props to your sweet apocalypse, but we could use some more of it.
  
  Sweet. Thanks.
  
  Sincerely,
  
  Erin
• 
  Aaron

  It was the playwright that got to me. I was already into this book. Digging it, if you will. On page 272, a playwright gets gunned down and, as he dies, he begs our hero to "Find my play." He even tells the hero where to find it and then asks him to make necessary changes. "In Act IV," he instructs, "erase the cruel words that Lonnie speaks. He doesn't mean it. I know that now."
  
  This got to me.
  
  Isn't this one of the reasons we choose to write? For immortality, for recognition even after we die?
  
  As I said, this got to me. I was already thinking that I haven't laughed out loud at a book this much since
  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And amidst my laughter, I am moved. Almost to tears. Moved by a playwright who has suddenly realized that his own life eternal lies in an unproduced manuscript sitting quietly on a shelf beside his bed.
  
  Does telling you about the playwright ruin where Adam Johnson's awe-inspiring book might be heading? Taken out of context, this anecdote doesn't mean anything. You really do have to read this book to understand the gravity and power of the story Mr. Johnson weaves. So what if you know ahead of time that a playwright dies on page 272? Read it anyway because this book is brilliant, and I'm not so sure that "brilliant" is a big enough word to encompass the majesty of this prose.
  
  I almost didn't read it. A review I read turned me off. The review stated that this novel was "so steeped in anthropology that it becomes impossible to read without some prior knowledge of anthropological thought, rendering it, for the layman, impossible to finish." Bull, I say. Despite the anthropology, it's quite accessible. If anything, it's more about philosophy than anthropology, positing that all of us are doctoral candidates of anthropology. Wondering what happened to a friend you haven't seen in ten years, imagining their outcome, a scenario they might have found themselves in based on what you know of the person they were, is, in its own right, a form of anthropology. We use anthropology to revive the dead, see how they lived, learn how they fared. By definition, we are all armchair anthropologists.
  
  Okay, a brief plot recap (hopefully, without ruining anything -- this book is full of moments you don't see coming). Hank Hannah is a down-on-his-luck professor of anthropology at a small college in South Dakota. His focus is on the Clovis, the first known people to reside on North American land, having crossed the ice bridges from Asia during the last Ice Age. His theory is that the wildlife of The Pleistocene Era were not killed off by climactic change or malnutrition, but by the Clovis people, a band of fierce hunters. Hunters who continually hunted their prey until there was nothing left to hunt. One of his students (Brent Eggers, who just might be one of recent literature's greatest creations) is working on a dissertation that requires him to live, for one year, like The Clovis, limiting himself to only the tools and technology that were available during the Pleistocene Era. He camps on the college quadrangle in a make-shift hut, milking the squirrel supply for all it is worth. He also discovers proof that The Clovis existed in the area in the form of an arrowhead and a grave that houses a complete skeleton, found holding a perfect sphere made of clay. This discovery will eventually lead to the eradication of life, starting with pigs, moving on to birds, ending with humans. There's an ill-fated Corvette, a burning hog, a trestle destroyed by a great flood, and a hair-raising toboggan ride through an unspeakable graveyard. But I'm ahead of myself again...
  
  Populated with a vivid cast of eccentric characters this book has the power to move you. To make you laugh. To make you think. To make you insanely glad that Johnson has created a world of fiction. Read this book. Discover its brilliance. Laugh, cry, be shocked, and keep your eyes alert for burning pyres.
• 
  Steven Godin

  Adam Johnson's writing must have made a massive leap forward to win the Pulitzer prize for 'The Orphan Masters Son' as I thought this a complete and utter disaster, featuring some very shoddy writing and an outrageously stupid plot that was quite frankly all over the place! I wanted to quit but kept on going in the hope of it somehow miraculously getting better. It was only to get worse if anything. A total waste of time. Seriously, don't even bother.
• 
  Chris

  Guh. You know, who doesn't love a good end-of-the-world story, to say nothing of an end of the world story involving a tarblack sense of humor and a big, burning pig, but I swear I just don't know how many more books we need about past-their-prime academics who can't get a handle on their lives who muddle through their role as an uninspiring lead.
  
  I mean, I tried sticking around (like 'Titanic') to see the world end, but this book couldn't get out of its own way -- it pretty much droned on and on about the eccentric students, the main character's dead-end romantic urges, the tending to an anthropological site in the shadow of a Dakota casino (yay, irony) and just never got on with it. I ran away about 3/4 through, the book's world still intact, no character really changing or making me give a damn what happens to them and generally tired of waiting for the apocalypse to wipe them all away. Suffice to say, if the main character was the last one left in the world at the close of the book, that wasn't a world I really wanted to read about.
• 
  Barbi

  While the premise is interesting, this is an example of a book with terrible pacing. The beginning of the book crawled, and too much was jammed into the end. It felt like two different book crammed into one. At the end, I was annoyed with myself for finishing the book.
• 
  Adam

  Horrible writing. I can't help but shake the feeling that the author wrote this in grad school with the hopes it would be picked up for a movie. But the writing and especially the dialogue are suitable for only a Sci-Fi Network TV-Movie.
  
  Midlife Crisis Academic - Check
  Quirky Old Man - Check
  Cold Woman eventually warms up to Midlife Crisis Academic - Check
  Various slapstick shenanigans - Check
  Adventures with animals, extreme weather, military and various other things to spice up a movie script. - Check
  
  
• 
  Chazzbot

  This is the best end-of-the-world novel I've ever read. What begins as a razor-sharp satire of academia (tenured professors who've lost their passion, grad students trying to make a name for themselves, the tedious social order of the university) and archeology slowly boils into a equally sharp portrayal of a world collapsing on itself. Though the novel ends on a rather bleak note--Johnson finds little salvation in humanity's struggle--it is as realistic and darkly comedic as you might hope an apocalyptic novel could be. Months after reading this, it still haunts me with its bitterly honest depictions of human failings. One could easily find things going this way, and that is perhaps the most rewarding aspect of this novel.
• 
  acellnamedscooter

  I am left with a 'huh?' feeling after finishing this book. It feels like there was so much build up and then it ended so quickly, like the author ran over a deadline and had to wrap it up. The climax is so rushed over, that it could easily be missed (I had to go back and read it twice). Why all the mom-issues that he spent ages agonizing about are never referred to after the climax? Julia (or is it Yulia??) - why the obsession? Still don't get it.
  The end of the world scenario is a frightening idea, but the author just didn't make it real enough...or universal enough (apparently, even 'scientists' can conclude that the wipeout of a small town in the Midwest automatically means the rest of the world is gone). I don't recommend this book unless you are looking for a sleep aid.
• 
  Christy

  The book jacket for Parasites Like Us states, "Times are changing in South Dakota. Birds are disappearing. Dogs are turning on mankind. Hogs are no more." This is all true--by about chapter nine of twelve. (And these are long chapters.) More than half of the book is taken up with the protagonist's life as an academic, his relationship with his students, his relationship with his father (and his dead stepmother and the mother who abandoned him as a child), and his infatuation with a new woman, Yulia, whom he meets at a party. For a novel about a guy dealing with his own issues of loss, desire, and acceptance, this works well. For a novel about the end of the world, not so much.
  
  Nevertheless, there are some really interesting ideas here. One recurring idea is that of parasitism. Hank Hannah, the protagonist, is a paleoanthropologist who studies the Clovis people, the progenitors of Native Americans, those people who came over to America at the end of the last Ice Age and subsequently wiped out huge swaths of mammalian life of the time. Hannah argues that the Clovis were essentially parasites who took more than they needed and left the world less diverse and interesting for it. This concept is not limited in application to these ancient people, however:
  
  "...these [rich people gambling at the casino] were the real Clovis: people who used for themselves the resources of many, who exploited their environment to depletion, and, once everything they wanted was gone, would skip town. . . . The Clovis took and took and took, leaving six hundred generations of descendents to fend for themselves in an impoverished world, a place without horses to ride, elephants to tame, or camels to burden." (89)
  
  Similarly, he thinks, "But the Clovis simply plundered the first sunny days of humanity, just as we, a thousand years overdue for the next Ice Age, were plundering the last" (125). And: "If the history of humanity has been the extinguishing other forms of life, it's hard to say whether we have been evolving. The Clovis built an empire of meat, and their parting gift to the earth was to leave it thirty-five species lighter. And our last gasp was to eradicate hogs and birds" (304). Parasites like us, indeed.
  
  Another idea that I found particularly compelling is Hannah's reflection on survival:
  
  "The more you learned about life, the more it seemed an engine of little design, and to survive its queer lottery was what we called living. You could choose to celebrate this survival, as my father did, or you could mourn the misfortunes of others, which I figured was the least we could do. But the future would prove us both wrong--to live when others do not, we were to learn, isn't survival, but being left behind." (176-77)
  
  This idea of survival as being left behind is one that comes out of Hank's particular situation (he is scarred by his mother's abandonment of him), but it is one that carries some weight for me, too.
  
  And on the subject of the afterlife, Hank asks his father, after the rest of humanity (aside from the two of them and about 10 others that they've found thus far) has been destroyed, if he believes in an afterlife. His father's answer is this: "Well, if afterlife means to keep living on after life is over, don't you think that's us? Aren't we doing that?" But Hank wonders, "Couldn't we have made our lives matter more during our before-life?" (332). This is a question worth holding on to. What would we need to do to make our lives more meaningful during the before-life? What would we need to do to live by the credo illustrated by McCarthy's The Road, to live as if everything we do matters, even in the face of evidence to the contrary?
  
  Finally, Hank, in his narration of this tale of the (near) end of humanity for later generations, includes his own personal philosophy:
  
  "I have come to believe, after a life of research and personal observation, that there are two fallacies to being human, one great paradox, and three crimes. The first crime against existence is hope. After that great savager of life, the second crime is nostalgia, generally a lesser offense. Anthropology will teach you that there's no such thing as the good old days, but hope--hope drives death's getaway car." (37)
  
  The rest of the elements are scattered throughout the book, waiting to be discovered. The third crime against existence seems to be giving false hope to a child. The two fallacies? Hank says, "the first is that people invariably believe they live in times of great change and significance. Eighteenth-century England believed it. The pharaohs believed it. Turn-of-the-millennium America believes it" (53). The second is "the notion of 'climax'" (144), the idea that we have a sense of great moments occurring as they occur, the idea that the high points in our lives are clear to us. This is simply not true, he says, citing multiple examples (with, of course, many more left unsaid) of false climax, moments when individuals declared this moment, whatever it may have been, to be the pinnacle of their achievements, only to go on and do bigger and better things. The one great paradox is "that for someone truly to reside within you, they must be wholly unavailable" (260).
• 
  Emily

  I just loved The Orphan Master's son and thought I would go back to early Adam Johnson to get a good idea of his humble roots. But this book was weird. Not really even a good weird. Kind of a gross weird. There's a lot of archaeology talk in here which turns out to be more existential than Jurassic Park. Throw in some post apocalyptic stuff and there you have it. I think it was certainly creative but most of the time the concept was lost on me. I still think he's great though! Go Adam Go!
• 
  David

  Interesting premise (anthropologist disturbs an artifact in an ancient burial mound and triggers the apocalypse); but the development was rambling, poorly written and completely boring.
  
  Full disclosure: I stopped reading this book with only about 40 pages to go, because I just couldn't stand it any longer.
• 
  Lauren Smith

  Ridiculously boring.
• 
  Jonathan Herbrecht

  Immense chef-d'œuvre.
  Bien sûr, commencer un avis, aussi court soit-il, par une sorte d'évidence présomptueuse pourrait mener à une catastrophe, mais là il n'en est rien.
  L'histoire débute sur une érudition totale, toujours pleine d'humour et de gravité, et enfonce sans peine la myriade de lecture post-apocalyptique qui inonde les librairies depuis un certain moment. C'est vraiment, mais vraiment un grand bouquin. Une très belle lecture. Et puis, pour ceux qui ne le connaissent pas encore, on a quand même à faire au génie d'Adam Johnson.
  À lire d'urgence.
  
• 
  Ryandake

  wow, i can't believe i hadn't read this before, or that none of my friends insisted i read it--it is so perfectly up my alley, and so well-done.
  
  why does it inhabit the alley? because there's a lot to be learned in this book, in this case about how people who dig up other people for a living view the world. our hero, Hank Hannah, is sliding rather too rapidly into the academic dustbin (but he has tenure!). his love life is nonexistent. his family is shattered; he has only one friend. he has two oddball students who revere him for his past work, but he hasn't had an original thought in years.
  
  so, at this low point, our story opens, and it's about to get a lot lower, because Hank's about to unleash one of the horsemen of the apocalypse on humankind.
  
  none of the above is spoiler turf--it's all pretty much on the back cover of the book. but you have to be somewhat patient, because the apocalypse isn't going to come for more than half the book. so if you're reading for death and destruction only, you're going to have quite a wait before you get it. death and destruction are not, i think, the point of this book.
  
  the portrait of Hank is a wonder. Johnson is pretty masterful at manipulating the reader's emotions vis. Mr. Hannah. Hank's not a hero; he's not even a perfectly sympathetic character. he has illusions, bad habits, failings, a few neuroses, and cannot even manage to be buff. he gets pushed around, trodden on, his comeuppance comes in buckets. yet he also shows some deep understanding about humans, and a serious passion for his work, and try as you might when he gets weaselly, you just can't hate the guy.
  
  and because he is an anthropologist/archaeologist, he has the long view. like, the really long view, the millennia-long long view. for him, the end of the world is only the most recent end of the world--for civilizations and countless peoples, the world has ended and ended and ended. Hank's never blase about it, but he never forgets it, either. this is a great perspective to have, at the end of the world.
• 
  Kaethe

  I was disappointed by a plague with a 99.99999999% kill rate and 100% transmission and a < 1 week timetable, even though that sort of scenario crops up perpetually in fiction. And a poor male:female basis for human survival; too much literary, not enough science. On the other hand, I really liked the characters, the sense of place, and the academic aspect.
  
  It may be that I now know too much about plagues to ever really enjoy such a scenario.
• 
  Lori Lynn

  There was so much I hated about this book. I would have quit within the first 100 pages, but I was waiting to get some new books for Christmas, so stuck with it. I loved the Orphan Master's Son by Johnson, but this book seemed all wrong to me. First, the characters are all unlikable. I'm not sure the author would today write a book about a professor who leers after female grad students. Second, the plot was predictable. Maybe that was intentional, because there was a lot of foreshadowing, but the book ended exactly as I thought it would as soon as the Keno orb was found. Third, there were things that didn't work for me as a lawyer who grew up in South Dakota. (Stop reading here to avoid spoilers.) It is pretty clear that Parkton is based on Yankton, which really does have a college that became a federal prison. But, beyond that, the attempt to capture the local setting goes awry. The weather is all wrong, as he can't seem to distinguish between a hard freeze and how the water would or would not be frozen on large lakes and when people would be driving on them (not to mention no native of South Dakota who I know would be stupid enough to drive two cars on the lake ice and then try to cut the ice to drop one car while the other car and a person were close enough to be taken down). And fleas don't live in South Dakota in the winter, at least not given the temperatures he was describing around the time he supposedly contracted fleas while sleeping outside. Farley the lawyer engages in dating an expert witness (which is highly inappropriate under legal ethical rules) and supposedly serving writs himself (which lawyers do not do; they hire process servers for that, for legal reasons that most readers would not know, but any qualified lawyer would know). Overall a very disappointing read.
• 
  Rianonne

  Managed only the first 50 pages - just not my cup of tea ...
• 
  Jana

  2.5*
• 
  John Moon

  This plot moves slooowwwww for the first 2/3 of the book, but the ending ramps it up. Although not a must read, there's some really good passages that made it worth it.
• 
  Luther Siler

  Genuinely embarrassing, with passages that deserve highlighting on the MenWriteWomen Twitter account.
• 
  Susan

  Dr Hank Hannah is a professor of anthropology at the University of Southeastern South Dakota. In this novel, we learn of how he studies the Clovis people – the first humans to cross the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia 12,000 years previously, created an empire, exploited the lands resources and then disbanded into over 600 Native American tribes. Much of this book is ironic and filled with dark humour; tying in the exploitation of the land so long ago to events in the present.
  
  Hannah has two students whose work he is overseeing. One is Trudy, who Hannah worships from afar. The other is Eggers, who, although he comes from an extremely wealthy background, is living the life of the Clovis – a Stone Age man in modern day America. When Eggers discovers a Clovis burial site, in land on which a new casino is about to be built, he wants to evacuate the site with Paleolithic technology. This, obviously, is highly illegal and when an old nemesis of Hannah’s appears - Sheriff Gerry – resentments from High School are brought into play. What follows sees Hannah serving a brief sentence in the “cushiest prison in the Western hemisphere,” after being accused of grave robbing. However, there are also fearful repercussions about to be unleashed from a sphere found in the burial ground, which may well see the future of humanity looking very doubtful indeed...
  
  This is the debut novel of a Pullitzer Prize winning author and is very assured for a first book. Hannah is a little earnest and well meaning at times – concerned with always being the modern man, he worries about his father, his missing mother, his beloved step-mother who died recently and yearns for love. However, I thought the themes tying past and present were very well done and I enjoyed the relationship Hannah had with Eggers and, also, with Gerry. Fun is poked at many institutions, many of them academic; but it is Hannah’s voice who takes you through the plot and his voice is always believable and his story told with self deprecating humour. Characters are well rounded and human; much of the book made me laugh and it also made me think. This story is told with wry humour, which turns a very serious message into an entertaining read. Lastly, I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.
  
  
• 
  Judy

  Hank Hannah is an anthropologist working at The University of South Eastern South Dakota. He once wrote a book about the Clovis people, the first people to cross the Bering Strait to North America, and who were thought to have caused the extinction of 35 species of mammals. He is no longer held in such high esteem by his peers, having produced nothing of note since writing his book “The Depletionists”. He is supervising two anthropology students – Eggers is living in the style of the Clovis people for one year as part of his thesis. He eats the local wildlife (squirrels), wears animal hides and uses primitive tools. Trudy, the other student, is a strong woman who is a target for Hank’s latent lust.
  
  Eggers discovers a grave of what appears to be a Clovis woman and in that grave are two clay balls, inside of which will be the future of the human race.
  
  The reader knows from the start that humanity is about to suffer its own extinction, but it is a long wait before we get there. It takes about 150 pages before the disaster occurs, but those 150 pages are full of fun and games. Hank’s relationship with his father is interesting, his thoughts on his mother and his step-mother – both now gone – are quite moving; his friend Farley is a complex character and the policeman with his tribe of children provide some light relief. And then there is Julia, a paleobotanist from Russia with a past.
  
  This book is a real romp. It is light and breezy and easy to read. Yes, there is a strong message within its pages, but rather than being a preachy book, it is fun and amusing.
  
• 
  Lisa Houlihan

  One of the best typos ever: Instead of dropping the tranny (transmission), someone "drops the tyranny." Fight the power!
  
  199: "I've taken a liking to a dish I call 'culvert surprise.'"
  
  It also took me till page 199 to read the title's "like" as a verb instead of only a preposition.
  
  The pacing is uneven and the two parts of the book don't quite flow but they're both great so that's okay.
  
  It bothers me that I can't pin "Parkton" with its "University of Southeastern South Dakota" to a particular place. There's a Yankton that fits geographically, with a dam and a lake and a park named for Lewis and Clark. The cities that the characters readily name are Omaha and Des Moines, which makes sense with the the actual University of South Dakota being in the far southeastern corner of the state. That all is just me not accounting for "fiction."
  
  What is allowed to bother me is that both southeastern SD and northwestern ND are in the Central time zone, so the mention of passing a sign indicating a zone border makes no sense. Traveling between them you might pass through the Mountain time zone, if you strayed from the left bank of the Missouri River. Whatever. It is not unreasonable to pick nits in a book so riddled with parasites.
  
  (I recently re^n-read a comfort book in which people in Scotland call Spain and Spain is two hours behind GMT. Clearly, this novel can no longer be a comfort book.)
• 
  Glenn Murphy

  It often amazes me how some of the most thoughtful, philosophical writing comes intertwined with over the top satire. Maybe it needs to be that way, maybe the ridiculous puts you off guard and lets the serious sneak up on you. The character of Hank Hannah and the plot he's caught up in are absurd, but through him Johnson explores very real issues of coping with loss, loneliness, and isolation, and does it with carefully crafted and sometimes beautiful language.
  
  "If there are ghosts on this earth, they are formed by the things you cannot utter, and they'll outlive the black in your teeth, burn hotter than any hole in your stomach."
  
  "To them, I'd always be the first chapter in a book they set aside and never finished."
  
  "The stars looked away from me."
  
  "A zoo is where you store animals that are going extinct. Sticking an animal in a zoo means you've given up on it."
  
  "Unremembering another's name and story is a strictly human pastime, and only we have learned that, to truly get the last word, you must give silence."
  
  "Stars, if you'll notice, burn dimly and alone."
  
  "It seemed to me that what Eggers was really demonstrating was that it was easier to put your faith in the possibility that twelve-thousand-year-old corn could pop than in the hope that the person you needed also needed you."
• 
  Steve Kreidler

  I completely loved this wild fable of deconstruction. Johnson is whip smart and if you enjoy erudite, funny, and elucidating writing, look no further. It took much longer than usual to finish this novel as I found myself re-reading passage upon passage, sometimes just to let the language flow over me and sometimes to reflect and absorb the little miracles of truth spread throughout.
  
  The plot involves the circuitous route that a ragtag fellowship of anthropologist students, their professor, and other relatives and characters take as the world literally falls apart around them. I read this as a metaphor for our treatment of the earth and the disastrous end game to be played out. But you may get something completely different. Healed relationships? Yep. Self reflection? In spades. Humorous yet touching? Got it.
  
  I highly recommend this to the more adventurous reader, to the serious lover of quality contemporary literature, and to book lovers everywhere. Let your crazy dangle a little and try this delightful tome.
• 
  Chris

  Adam Johnson has an amazing book in him. This is not that book: with its narrator who shades a bit too detestable and its frankly baffling pacing it's pretty far from it in fact. Even the comparatively brilliant Orphan Master's Son is not that book. But there are enough moments here where Johnson is note-perfect to prove to me that he will eventually get one just right and to guarantee that I'll be reading everything he writes, waiting for that day.