Review of The Shatterer of Worlds

In the year or so immediately after the events of September 11th, there was a spate of stories and essays reflecting on what it meant. That’s not surprising, of course, for such a major event. It’s a bold move to retread that territory at all, and it makes sense that the way to approach it would be to take a wild approach. That’s precisely what Cam Neumeyer does in her striking debut novel, The Shatterer of Worlds. Rather than the targets being the White House, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center Towers, Neumeyer imagines an attack that targeted Disney World, Yankee Stadium, and a conglomeration of movie sets. It gives an entirely different understanding of American culture. Rather than targeting commerce, the military, and the government, the attacks in this novel go after the things Americans interact with daily, that they see.

Obviously, this suggests a different understanding of America on the part of the terrorists, but it leads us to a different understanding as well. In Shatterer, the American response is rooted in the strange bedfellows of military action and film and television. While our reality included plenty of jingoistic songs and films, Neumeyer’s vision looks at a cultural landscape where propaganda is much more subtle and insidious than our timeline’s. Rather than Toby Keith’s Angry American, we see a reboot of the Mousketeers that is at once ethnically (though perhaps not culturally) diverse and also deeply nationalistic. Neumeyer’s portrayal takes the time to give a clear logic to the development of all this.

What’s interesting is to see the extent to which Disney ends up driving things. Rather than the military forcing pro baseball or movie studios to foreground the stars and stripes, Neumeyer presents a world in which the army is steered into an advertisement for American pop culture. One of the admirable aspects of the book is how Neumeyer handles the gradual shift from trying to present “a united front” to Mickey Mouse ears appearing on military uniforms to platoons, troops, and divisions losing their numbers and being labeled by Disney or comic book hero characters. From there, it’s not hard to see the through line to a world where federal workers are deployed to protect and serve corporations. What’s remarkable is that the full rendering of the events from the attacks to the eventual corporatocracy let’s us see the lunacy of the path while also recognizing that so many of the conclusions of those paths are not so far from our current world. Neumeyer’s corporate speak (“funterns” as opposed to “interns”) helps us to both shake our head at the world and also recognize that it’s not so far from our systems relying upon unpaid work to keep itself moving. In that sense, the strangest parts of the novel’s world are not the fictitious parts but the aspects that are rooted in our experience.

Without spoiling the end, I can say that it is disappointing. That is not necessarily a criticism. The ending is, in many ways, the ending that we deserve. It isn’t giving too much away to say that the disappointment of the ending is not because the ending is either overly predictable or too far-fetched. Instead, the disappointment from the ending is more a matter of how closely it dovetails with many of our current predicaments. In a world as strange as Shatterer (with Happy Meal toys being delivered to children whose homes have been destroyed by drones and the many trades and free-agent moves made by players looking to display their patriotism with new, ultra-American Yankee uniforms), being reminded of our grim world can feel defeating. But perhaps this is what the novel was meant to do. To give us a clear-eyed observation of our failure to reflect upon ourselves after the attacks. Now, two decades after the attacks, the book might be a good reminder of how much we could have done, and, perhaps, how much we still could do.