In his debut novel, Things We Didn't See Coming, Steven Amsterdam presents his unnamed narrator through nine short stories, each highlighting important events and turning points in his life. Through these stories, the reader gets an impression of a post-apocalyptic life where the focus on survival leads to savagery but also proves to be an interesting and surprising look at human nature and growth.
The narrator is a citizen of a nation where theft, abandonment and rampant disease have become widespread. When the book opens, he is a child taken by his parents to the countryside to escape an impending doom, which turns out to be the Y2K crisis. The reader is left wondering what exactly happens after technology runs amok in the year 2000, but it is clear that the unidentified country is now a completely different place from the world with which he was familiar. In this new world, the narrator quickly becomes an adroit thief and liar, eventually working his way into the government and falling into a toxic relationship. At the end of the book, he is an elderly tour guide catering to the terminally ill.
The missing years between the nine stories could give the saga an incomplete feel, but instead allow for a fast-paced story that could easily have been weighed down with minutiae. Amsterdam gives the reader a complete impression of a man who has been at war with everything for a lifetime without giving away every detail of his life. Constantly on the run, he meets many people who deeply impacted on him, including a manipulative woman, a charming but cruel 14-year-old boy and a contagious dying man who contaminates his camp. Any of these characters could have seemed trite or only present as filler, but they all play an important role in developing the narrator as well as exposing his insecurities, intelligence and somewhat immoral strengths. In the beginning, he is an unfeeling teenager taking what he wants without second thought, barely batting an eye when his grandparents pass away. As the years pass, he becomes more aware, his aspirations change and his motives become less selfish.
With its openness, the episodic novel manages to avoid the claustrophobic feel of other apocalyptic stories without losing any of their urgency. And despite its bleak setting, the dark novel is an enjoyable read with plenty of humor. Apart from the story and setting, the writing itself is quite interesting. The narrator's 'voice' grows as he does, and he never is portrayed as one-dimensional. Things' greatest triumph is creating a complete human from an inhuman world of destruction in an entertaining, humorous and heartbreakingly desperate way.
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