Bryan Walpert’s previous novel, the brilliant time-travel love story Entanglement, was shortlisted for the fiction prize at the 2022 Ockham NZ Book Awards. His latest treads different ground but works in a similar style: erudite prose untangling deeply intelligent ideas, with the bonus of carefully drawn characters.
Empathy opens with a thriller-type scenario. Edward Geller – grandfather, widower and a chemist who creates perfumes for a fragrance company – has been kidnapped. His science-teacher son David, who moved his family back to his childhood home after his mother’s death a few years earlier, is also recently widowed, and he’s desperate to find his father.
David loves to be in control, and lately he has felt “like he was perpetually stationed in front of the door to their lives with a sword, preventing chaos from entering”. After a mysterious phone call, David realises there might be more to his father’s case than the police file suggests. He decides to investigate his father’s disappearance, with the ghost of his wife Molly gently haunting and encouraging him to break out of his comfort zone.
A secondary storyline that weaves through the novel concerns Alison Morris, an executive at a corporate perfume company, and her husband Jim, an aspiring video-game developer who is miserable working as a low-level employee at a software company.
Alison and Jim’s marriage is under pressure: Alison wants a better life for her daughter than the one she had growing up, so she works hard to secure a promotion and a much-needed raise. If she doesn’t get these things, she knows Jim won’t be the one to provide for them. In fact, she’s starting to understand she’s overestimated her husband, and that, unfairly or not, she’s “upset with him for having betrayed a promise he had never in fact made to her – to be the source of stability she’d never had when she was young”.
When Jim leaves his awful job with colleague Eli to create a video game – a peaceful first-person challenge game called EmPath in which players are coupled with a random stranger to complete challenges, and success is linked to your ability to understand your unknown partner without in-game chat – he’s finally happy, but there’s more pressure than ever.
Without his income, the couple have to dip into their meagre savings to cover the added childcare costs and the mortgage repayments. There is “less resentment” in the relationship now that Jim is working on something he’s passionate about, but there are “new forms of distance” growing between them. The success of EmPath is critical, financially and emotionally.
Empathy is interested in secrets, control, divisions and the distance between people. There are repeating scenes and descriptions of people feeling claustrophobic, perhaps intuiting the conditions of living solely inside our own minds. The characters reflect the reality we all endure: an inability to truly communicate with and understand others, even those closest to us.
Alison often feels detached from Jim, and even when “she wanted to explore some of these thoughts with Jim, to get inside his head, to ask if he had any regrets”, she doesn’t know how. And David, on the trail of his father, thinks more about his childhood, and how certain things his father did, which might have felt annoying or ridiculous, were actually “a way to deal with a distance his father did not know how to bridge”.
Empathy is mostly a slow, interior-driven novel filled with lush and clever passages: “He looked at his picture behind the glass on the frame, the reflection of his current face over the image of his young face staring out past a father who had not yet disappeared into a future it was best for his younger self not to see.” These quieter sections, however, alternate with faster-paced scenes that create an addictive edge to an otherwise literary novel. The stakes seem quite low until, suddenly, they are so high and grotesque that one might gasp and put the book down in shock.
Walpert’s main preoccupation is the nature and limits of empathy (the video game’s name recalls the non-clinical term “empath”, someone who has heightened empathy, sometimes even to the detriment of their own wellbeing). With astute insight and a clear dedication to craft, Walpert questions if it’s possible to truly forgive – and whether, in fact, we should.
The novel considers what might happen if there was a way to open “your mind to what others were feeling, quite powerfully”, and then, what might happen if that induced empathy were so powerful it also “sublimated your own feelings and preferences to those you felt in others”, and what might follow if such a perverse generosity could be exploited to the benefit of those wielding the power.
Empathy, by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press, $40), is out now.
