The Body Scout
Lincoln Michel’s The Body Scout follows Kobo, a baseball talent scout who turns amateur detective following the gory, public death of his brother, baseball superstar JJ Zunz. It’s a propulsive ride through a near-future New York filled with augmented human beings, hybrid animals, and literal Neanderthals. This review contains mild spoilers.
What’s immediately impressive about The Body Scout is the author’s attention to worldbuilding. Each new detail about this future world is so specific and comes one after another, that you might miss a cool detail if you blink. The effect is both immersive and trippy (think The Fifth Element), which is what I love about my fave SF stories. There’s a high weird factor too, and because we are dealing with a world where people do all sorts of body modification, there’s a bit of visceral gore too. I particularly enjoyed the section where Kobo has to go to an underground sex club—the way people interact and the tech that is featured in those scenes really bring together the best elements of both SF and noir.
And that’s what the other half of this genre-blending book is: a detective story. The mystery plot finds our protagonist meeting all sorts of quirky characters in locales in a hypercapitalist NYC, which was fun in and of itself. The way the mystery unfolds sometimes feels a bit on the rails, but the reversals and reveals in the last few chapters more than make up for it.
Of course I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t comment on the book’s broader themes. The Body Scout succeeds in examining our relationships with bodies. From labor to narcotics to aesthetics to sex and desire, through moral, bioethical, and even legal lenses, the story deftly explores how we view and treat our own meatsacks and others’, and how our social structures exploit them.
Overall, this book fired on all cylinders for me. It’s fun, it’s insightful, it’s got a tight plot, and I’m looking forward to reading Mr. Michel’s future books.
Other things I’ve read lately:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. The prose is gorgeous, the plot is so well-crafted, and I wish I could tell you what it’s about but, one, that would be hard to do in a short writeup, and two, I don’t want to spoil it. There’s an infinitely large, wondrous house and its inhabitant, the titular character, who has to survive the highs and lows of this strange world. We discover the house through his eyes, and just like it, the book itself has many layers, each one as beautiful and complex as the last.
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. Books rarely make me cry, but this one got me. It also made me laugh—a lot! Maybe it’s because it follows an Asian dude in America, but I think will resonate with anyone who is regularly confronted by how the world views who they are. It’s an excellent story on its own, but the structure and format really knocked it out of the park for me.