Review by Tara Cheesman
Nan A. Talese (PRH) / August, 2019 / 288 pp / Translated by John Cullen
The setting, a dystopian world only two decades removed from our own, is the most intriguing part of German writer Juli Zeh’s 2019 thriller, Empty Hearts. Flaunting social taboos, specifically those around suicide and terrorism, it reminds me of the 1988 black comedy /teen angst film Heathers. A film that was, you could argue, ahead of its time. The Paramount Network recently attempted a reboot of Heathers as a television series, only to cancel it in the wake of several school shootings (something that existed, but wouldn’t garner the level of media attention we’re accustomed to until the Columbine tragedy a decade later), and then finally airing a sanitized version at the end of 2019. Empty Hearts now has the opposite problem.
Tantalizingly familiar while remaining comfortingly speculative, on publication in August 2019 the novel seemed darkly, even ruthlessly, nihilistic. Before Brexit, before impeachment hearings, before the death of George Floyd. And, of course, before COVID-19.
In the world Zeh imagines, the UK has left the European Union, inspiring other EU nations to create their own nationalist movements with catchy portmanteaux – Frexit, Spexit and Swexit. Trump is gone, though it seems even a novelist couldn’t conjure the insane downward spiral of his actual presidency in 2017, the year Empty Hearts was originally published in German. Angela Merkel has been voted out of power by the extreme right, while the jaded, complacent liberal left has stopped participating in Democracy. They prefer their ivory towers, which is where we first meet the novel’s protagonist, Britta, who is hosting friends for dinner with her husband. The adults sit at the table, drinking wine and bemoaning the latest Concerned Citizens’ Crusade (CCC) efficiency package’s erosion of German Democratic freedoms, while their children play inexplicably violent games with dolls in the next room. This seemingly idyllic evening, familiar enough for us to want to invite our own friends over for dinner, yet alien enough to pique our curiosity, is interrupted by news of a failed terrorist attack by two suicide bombers at the Leipzig Airport.
Britta can afford her ivory tower (a modern, concrete home located in a second-tier German city) because she and her best friend, Babak, run a suicide prevention clinic. They employ a “special confrontation method” designed to test their clients’ commitment. After completing the program, most of their clients realize that they do not, in fact, wish to die. They leave with gratitude and pay generously. But the ones who fail, whose course cannot be diverted, are the true commodities in which Britta deals. The clinic is a front for The Bridge, where the real and far more lucrative service Britta and Babak provide is supplying terrorist organizations with suicide bombers.
Her pitch: if you intend to kill yourself, why not do it in service to something? To that end, The Bridge recruits candidates and matches them to whatever terrorist organization is looking to make a very loud statement – Islamist, environmental, animal rights, Free Flanders or Catalonia First! Britta, and by extension The Bridge, are atheistic when it comes to cause. As a result, they are so successful at identifying and preparing candidates that they dominate the German market. It has made them incredibly wealthy while allowing them to live quiet, unassuming lives. But the news report of the botched terrorist attack changes everything, exposing Britta and The Bridge as she attempts to ascertain who is responsible. What she discovers is a new terrorist group, calling themselves the Empty Hearts, who are intent on taking out the competition.
Literary thriller writers long ago embraced film conventions and, with the help of huge media conglomerates, the two remain intertwined. To describe Empty Hearts as cinematographic is almost redundant. It lives in the space between novel and screen. The plotting and pacing, chapters arranged like scenes on a storyboard, and the way the protagonist’s thoughts play out visually in her behaviors and interactions rather than through interior monologues – a decent scriptwriter could adapt Juli Zeh’s story into a Netflix limited series starring Emily Blunt within a week. There’s even the equivalent of a film montage already written into the book: after our characters are forced underground, Britta, Babak and their newest recruit prep their safehouse, scavenge supplies, argue, suffer emotional breakdowns, reach catharsis and generally just try not to kill each other -- all of which is compressed into twenty to thirty pages.
The true star of the novel, who chews up the scenery in the best possible way, is Julietta, The Bridge’s latest and most promising recruit. She’s a brooding twenty-something with the appearance of a supermodel. I pictured her as a less shiny version of Kendall Jenner. Beautiful, nihilistic, defiant, intelligent…did I mention beautiful?
“This one’s the star,” he says.
Julietta gazes up at him. Her hair falls in her face, and under it her eyes smolder like the eyes of a predatory animal.
“She belongs on the front line.”
John Cullen, whose work I’ve happily read and reviewed over the years, does an excellent job with the translation. The tone he employs in Empty Hearts, written with the close third person hovering over Britta, draws the reader in. Most importantly, he doesn’t pull away from middlebrow melodrama, of which this book has plenty. Julietta’s hair is the perfect example, getting an absurd amount of characterization on the page. She “shakes her hair and runs her fingers through it,” “pushes it away,” allows it to curtain her face or weaves it into small plaits and ties them into a knot to show “she’s a warrior.” Her hair becomes an extension of her personality, is treated almost as a separate character. Cullen’s straightforward prose goes a long way towards maintaining a fine balance between the seriousness of the book’s topics (suicide, terrorism, the collapse of democracy) and the abject silliness of its plot.
The novel is something of a conundrum. Empty Hearts brandishes cynicism and moral ambiguity, but then combines it with a strangely placed sentimentality. It feels like satire, except for the complete absence of anything resembling comedy. But if not satire then what, exactly, is the genre of this novel, aside from a thriller? Zeh has no shortage of interesting ideas and characters. For instance, the different terrorist organizations form a community of sorts and are aware of each other. Hassan, Britta’s Game of Thrones-obsessed contact in ISIS, is “more concerned about his Netflix access than jihad” and G. Flossen, her homeless contact in Green Power who carries his entire life under his voluminous rain poncho, are both characters I’d enjoy spending more time with. Julietta, and her hair, could carry an entire series of books. Also fascinating are Britta’s control issues, seemingly the driving force behind her commitment to The Bridge, combined with her moral distress which are so intense she suffers from nausea and stomach pains.
Zeh, whose book Eagles and Angels also trafficked in nihilism, suicide, and government conspiracy, might fit better with a small, independent publisher than the Nan A. Talese imprint. There is something of the indie about Empty Hearts and its author’s unwillingness to settle within the parameters of a single genre. The book lacks the careful packaging readers associate with a novel from a “Big 5” publisher. Even Zeh’s message about the dangers of complacency among a neoliberal elite, is muddled. When Britta acknowledges, at least to herself, that she has betrayed the ideals of her younger self, there is nothing particularly profound, or even interesting, in her revelation.
She has a dim memory of having felt differently, once upon a time. She sees herself standing in a voting booth and marking her ballot with great conviction. She knows that in days gone by she would discuss the question of whom to vote for with other people, and she remembers that the answer seemed important to her. She’s no longer so sure exactly when that was; definitely before the refugee crisis, Brexit, and Trump, and long before the second financial crisis and the meteoric rise of the Concerned Citizens’ Crusade. In another time.
Perhaps the novel is trying to address our collective existential emptiness and shared sensation of being morally adrift as a society…but that seems a heavy burden to expect it to carry. Particularly given an ending which is every bit as demented as Winona Ryder’s character putting an unlit cigarette in her mouth and waiting for Christian Slater to blow himself up. Zeh has written an excellent thriller. But there’s something missing, the absence of which doesn’t allow us to take the book’s ideas seriously.
In the end, Empty Hearts just isn’t messy enough to compete with our current reality. The plot is too tightly constructed, the characters too focused, and the world too self-contained for this story to be anything other than fiction. Too much makes sense. Everything has a reason, and the characters act according to an inherent, if flawed, logic. A year ago, that might have worked. Now we all know that the collapse of normalcy is predicated on events that don’t make sense. Everything that is entertaining in this book – and Empty Hearts is a definite page-turner – lowers the stakes for the reader. Which might not be what the author wanted, but still works in its favor during this long, seemingly never-ending, summer of 2020.
Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Quarterly Conversation, Book Riot, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Rumpus and other online publications. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @booksexyreview and Instagram @taracheesman.