American debut novelist Steven Amsterdam lives in Melbourne and I’d never heard of him before stumblng onto his Things We Didn’t See Coming. Call it a cross between Olive Kitteridge (interlocked short stories) and The Road (distopia incarnate).
Amsterdam imagines a world where the year 2000 does, after all, bring catastrophe to the globe. in the very first story, the young protagonist helps his father load their belongings into the car. At his grandparents’ place he has to choose between the complacent mother and grandparents, and his father equipped for survival. Another story sees our hero driving his grandparents out of the cordoned-0ff city into the abusive countryside. We see him riding a ‘rain horse’ through floods, persuading homeowners to leave. Other stories introduce a strange girlfriend uniquely equipped to survive. Each story takes the world deeper into a fractured, climate-change-threatened world.
The style employed by Amsterdam is laconic yet vulnerable. Much is left unstated (including locations and the precise nature of the globe’s ills) and each story exists within an environment the reader has to figure out. Despair is everywhere and despair comes through in the voice of our hero. Yet even stronger drives can be gleaned, those of survival and the search for belonging, and Amsterdam captures these gently, between the written lines. Things We Didn’t See Coming is a measured, literate dystopia novel.