LAUREN FRAYER, HOST:
Matt Greene's new novel, "The Definitions," starts with a simple, relatable scene - new dormmates getting to know each other. It could be any college campus. But there is a dystopian backstory. These students are survivors of a virus that has erased people's memories. I spoke with Greene and asked what inspired him to write about people trying to navigate the world in this way.
MATT GREENE: This sort of rush towards authoritarianism from electorates across the world was definitely a big consideration. The acceleration or hyper acceleration of our sort of disconnect between language and meaning and the industrialization of that post-meaning landscape was definitely something that was playing on my mind. But the main thing probably was that my oldest son started school.
FRAYER: What did you see your son going through that prompted you to imagine this dystopian world?
GREENE: (Laughter) Well, I guess the big influence of the pandemic would be that my son was never in any child care before school. It's fascinating, seeing kids socialize and remembering the process of doing that and seeing how quickly these social hierarchies and structures develop.
FRAYER: So tell me about the world that's inside this book. The characters are at a school that's called The Center. Who are the teachers? Who are the students?
GREENE: So the students arrive nameless, and they acquire names from the cartridges that they are shown, which readers will recognize. I won't give away exactly what they are, but they'll certainly recognize them.
FRAYER: Rachel, Chandler, Ross - hint hint.
GREENE: (Laughter) Exactly. And they've been stripped of their biographical memories. So they're essentially infantilized. They've been reduced to this childhood state. They are blank slates, and they're told that they're going to be reintegrated and they're going to convalesce in this facility while their memories return to them. What becomes clear is that this Center is less a medical institution and more of a reeducation camp, and they are being reeducated in a very particular political ideology, which may suggest something about the worlds they will be reintegrated into, if indeed they are reintegrated into it.
FRAYER: So the characters emerge from this virus with their ability to speak English intact, but they have to relearn vocabulary. Two of the characters debate the definition of a bench versus a chair, and I might just read a paragraph here. It's one of my favorite passages. The narrator says, (reading) in the end, we decided a chair was a chair if it was close enough to the image of a chair that we had in our minds when someone said the word chair. But this, too, proved impossible to apply. Who was to say when Chino said chair we were picturing the same perfect chair from which other chairs derived? Who was to say that my perfect chair wasn't really a bench or a horse or a bicycle?
I mean, that was just straight out of my philosophy classes in college. That is philosophy of language, right there. What are these characters trying to figure out here?
GREENE: I think what they're trying to figure out is the benevolence of the instruction that they're receiving. Given no context whatsoever, they're really unable to evaluate anything that they are being taught. So their intellectual curiosity really sort of falls on these words that they're being given. What they seem to be realizing quite intuitively in that scene and maybe beyond is that language is this really imperfect conduit. It aims to capture something that it cannot really capture. And at the same time, it offers them their most feasible possible opportunity for meaningful connection. If they can reckon with the inarticulacies of their language, they can hope to reach one another and reach outside of their circumstances. But at the same time, they have nothing but faith to take these definitions with and as they start to realize, as you kind of see in that scene, is that nothing can truly be defined in an uncontroversial way. There's always some ideological input that is driving that.
FRAYER: They take classes at this school on biology and grammar, but they also take classes called politeness and intermediate subservience, which sounds, like, straight out of George Orwell's "1984" or Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." And most of the characters are kind of naive, maybe with the exception of one - Chino. So what doubts do we start to have about this curriculum?
GREENE: I think our doubts certainly form before the matriculants' doubts, which in some cases don't form at all.
FRAYER: It's like we're watching them knowing what's happening to them and they don't know. I want to - I'm screaming...
GREENE: Yeah (laughter).
FRAYER: ...At them, you know, be cautious.
GREENE: Yeah, it's kind of like watching a horror film and watching them go down to the basement with the flashlight, right?
FRAYER: Yeah.
GREENE: You know that something is afoot, and they certainly don't.
FRAYER: Totally.
GREENE: And that was so important to me that if I was going to write something that would be classed as a dystopia, that the characters within it wouldn't recognize what they were living through as a dystopia.
FRAYER: I have so many questions about this book, (laughter) and I've read it twice.
GREENE: (Laughter) I'm very pleased to hear that. It's - you know, I'm - I was quite keen that the reader go away with some questions, and I didn't want it to be something that resolves for the reader in a way that they can then package it away...
FRAYER: Yeah.
GREENE: ...And not reflect on it. My hope, and maybe this is pure hubris, is that they'll sit with the questions and arrive at their own answers.
FRAYER: That's Matt Greene, whose new novel is called "The Definitions." Thank you.
GREENE: Thanks so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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