Getting Near the End

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Getting Near the End is a sharply sardonic, quietly moving, and
paradoxically optimistic vision of the end of the world (as we know it).
That allusion is all to the point in this novel about a megastar singer
who apparently has the ability to predict the future in her songs.
Weiner’s quietly understated style prevents the narrative from
wallowing in fake (megastar?) emotionalism while cutting to the bone of
individuals’ sense of love, loss, and social anomie.

Martha Nova, the world’s best-known singer-songwriter in the early
’teens, before she disappeared from public life, is preparing for her
comeback, at a huge party on New Year’s Eve 2023. One of the many
guests will be the only surviving member of the Mars mission, who has a
much stranger connection to her and her son than he knows, and who met
something on Mars so strange that it’s beyond all rational thought.
Outside, “the Nova Children,” who have followed and believed in
Martha’s music over the past decade, gather. Despite the state of the
world —little wars everywhere, ongoing “terrorism,” 80 percent
unemployment throughout the world, the almost complete destruction of
the environment, and much more—they are filled with hope, a belief
that the end her songs seem to predict will be for the better. They and
others will be the catalysts for whatever change is to come. But Weiner
provides an ending far more complex and downright weird than one
expects.

The novel is profoundly unsettling, somewhat in the manner of those of
one of Weiner’s masters, Barry Malzberg, but it achieves a sense of
fulfillment and honestly won optimism Malzberg refused. The context of
Getting Near the End is social and cultural despair, but the novel also
argues that art and hope do belong together, even in the worst of times.
What a fine end-of-the-world novel it turns out to be.