Book Review : Michael J. Seidlinger - The Body Harvest (2023)
Not everybody reading this is going to remember the AIDS epidemic of the nineties, but those who do will also remember the great bug catching scare. There was this moral panic over people catching HIV on purpose and screwing everything that moves without telling anyone. Although bug catchers did exist, they were essentially marginal and no one really tried to understand their motives. But author Michael J. Seidlinger does in his new novel The Body Harvest…. in a roundabout way?
The Body Harvest tells the story of Olivia and Will, two lost souls finding themselves at the heart of torments they’re 100% responsible for. They’re bug catchers. They're actively seeking the overbearing sensation of their body crashing and hurting. Olivia and Will feel like pariahs until the day they’re invited to join The Source, an online community of like-minded people who claim to know where the next big outbreak will be. Our star-crossed lovers feel understood at first, but it ends up being more complicated than that.
Feeling Sick to (Somewhat) Feel Alive
There's a lot going on in The Body Harvest. The back burb sells it as J.G Ballard’s Crash meets Albert Camus’ The Plague, but I found there were elements of Chuck Palahniuk's Rant and a byzantine charm reminiscent Don DeLillo’s older novels like Great Jones Street or Running Dog in there as well. But it's essentially about two broken people seeking viruses in order something. Anything. They’re trying to repair their relationship to their soul by establishing one with their body. It’s like reluctant, self-inflicted BDSM.
But Olivia and Will never quite find joy nor redemption through their practices, which is body the blessing and the curse of The Body Harvest. Because it's not a straightforward novel about two broken people wanting to live. It's a thoroughly byzantine novel about death anxiety and death drive coexisting as unlikely roommates inside young people's mind. The fact that Olivia and Will offer their bodies to outside pathogens is a breach of their physical and integrity. They disappear gradually instead of feeling at one with everything.
See, that’s super interesting on a conceptual level and Michael J. Seidlinger is very much a conceptual and controlled writer at heart, but the byproduct of that quirk is that his characters are often vessels of his ideas and don’t have much agency of their own. That’s is unfortunately the case of Olivia and Will that inherently accept their fate without bucking or questioning it all that much. That’s Seidlinger’s thing and style and it’s very much defensible, but it's not all that much mine? It felt telegraphic at times.
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There's a lot more to The Body Harvest. It's a novel that revels in its details and micromoments. It has this pretty Ballardian metacommentary on COVID and conspiracy theories that ties in to the death drive themes Seidlinger is exploring throughout the book. Part of it explains the "drone-like" nature of the characters too. We're disposable. Our bodies are meant to fail us eventually and looking for your own demise is a way to beat the death anxiety we're all trying to outrun through being healthy and safe.
In the world of The Body Harvest, the choices you make for yourself are always validated by the world whether they're healthy or not. Olivia and Will come looking for disease and they not only find it in themselves, but they find a superstructure that validate their desire to have their body violated by viruses. A super intricate idea, but the underlying motivation are explored only superficially. Bug catchers are the furthest thing from the soulless boogeyman that were portrayed in the nineties, but they’re kind of soullless anyway.
I enjoy the books of Michael J. Seidlinger. He exerts a level of control over his characters that prevents me from having an emotional experience while reading them, but he’s what I'd call an "interesting" that, so far, falls short of being transcendent. He’s inching his way up there, though. The Body Harvest is in the same league as Anybody Home? But it has a labyrinthine charm that was was missing from his earlier novel. The Body Harvest is a very anxious novel, but quite fitting for our times.
