Book Review: Recursion by Blake Crouch

Book #154 of 2019:

Recursion by Blake Crouch

At the start of this inventive sci-fi thriller, a New York City cop investigates a case of people suddenly remembering alternate lives they’ve never lived, while a tech genius a decade earlier researches a way to digitally record and retrieve the failing memories of Alzheimer’s patients. Author Blake Crouch quickly upends the expected connection between these plots, however: it isn’t that false memories are being implanted by the technology, but rather that a breakthrough has enabled a sort of time travel of consciousness back to when an encoded memory first occurred. The witnesses in New York are experiencing a genuine reality shift, brought on by someone making changes to the past.

The really clever bit that gives the novel its title is that again and again over the course of the narrative, someone winds up using the device to go back and redirect the timeline, spawning yet another wave of doubled recall. Sometimes it’s for personal gain, sometimes it’s to prevent an atrocity, and by the end it’s a frantic coil of repeated attempts to save the world from the unbearable weight of all that ensuing remembrance.

The action is exciting and mind-bending, and although it never quite reaches the poetic elegance of my favorite time loop stories — Version Control, Replay, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, the “White Tulip” episode of Fringe, etc. — it’s still an engaging rush through a fascinating concept.

[Content warning for suicide, gaslighting, and memory loss]

★★★★☆

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