Alternate lives

If you could live your life over again, would you change anything? Would you make any decisions differently? And if you’d chosen those other paths, would your life have been happier? Or more successful? Or more fulfilled?

I’ve been thinking about these questions because I just finished reading Matt Haig’s Midnight Library. In the novel, Nora—mid-thirties, depressed, and lonely—mixes her antidepressants with alcohol, intending to kill herself. But instead of dying, she winds up in a strange library, in which every book is a possible version of her life. Should she have married her boyfriend and lived out his dream of running a pub? Should she have lived out her father’s dream that she would be an Olympic swimmer? Or a teacher’s dream that she would be a glaciologist? Or her brother’s dream that she would write songs and propel their band to rock-star status? She gets to find out.

The Midnight Library is a type of speculative fiction that’s become increasingly popular recently, whether it’s in movies (such as Sliding Doors) or in novels (such as Stephen King’s Dark Tower series or even Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life). It’s a somewhat odd trend. What accounts for it?

Well, for one thing, postmodern literature thrives on using oddball concepts like alternate lives as fresh metaphors—and even as possibilities—for our new, technologically sophisticated lives.

For another, contemporary philosophic thought has been slowly absorbing our new kinds of science, especially quantum physics. In a famous 1952 lecture in Dublin, Schrondinger talked about equations that seemed to describe several different versions of events happening at the same time; the various events were, he commented, “not alternatives”; they “all really happen simultaneously.” Parallel universes is a cool idea. So it’s not surprising that, by 1963, the sci fi writer Michael Moorcock used Schrondinger’s theories to explore the concept he called the “multiverse.”

Since I’m not a Moorcock fan, I didn’t encounter the concept until I read Phillip Pullman’s sequels to The Golden Compass. In the second and third books of the series, several characters figure out how to cut “holes” between parallel universes and move between them—although to do so creates instabilities in the universe. Since the time I read those books, I’ve seen the concept of parallel universes popping up all over the place—even among scientists.

Does the multiverse theory have any scientific merit? Physicists are divided in their opinions. (One big problem: it can’t be proved or disproved with any evidence at our disposal.) As George Ellis noted in an article in Scientific American, “As skeptical as I am, I think the contemplation of the multiverse is an excellent opportunity to reflect on science and the ultimate nature of existence… Nothing is wrong with scientifically based philosophical speculation, which is what multiverse proposals are.” In other words, it’s not really science. It’s a new form of philosophy.

Some types of fiction explore the borderline between philosophy and literature, teasing out the intellectual, emotional, and existential issues provoked by deep questions. Parallel universes has caught on because it’s more than a cool speculative concept. (Coolness is enough for many teenage boys, but middle-aged adults prefer some emotional heft built into concepts.) It prompts fiction treatments of the idea because we all wonder, from time to time, how our lives would have turned out if we’d chosen a different career. Or married another person. Or had no children–or had eight of them.  And also because most of us, like Nora from The Midnight Library, carry around with us a Book of Regrets.

In Nora’s book, each chapter of the book chronicles her regrets from a specific year; the regrets range from minor to major, but their number rises every year. “There were continual, background regrets,” Haig writes, “which repeated on multiple pages… Some regrets were a little fainter than others. One regret shifted from practically invisible to bold and back again, as if it was flashing on and off, right as she looked at it.” (That’s the regret of not having had a child.) It’s dealing with those regrets, of course, that make up the substance of Nora’s journey.

What Midnight Library shares with a film like Groundhog Day or a series like The Good Place is a sense that a single human life isn’t enough to do the hard emotional work of becoming our best selves. We’re stubborn, we human beings. Like Nora, we get stuck. We cling to outmoded patterns of thought and behavior—even when they’re impoverishing our lives—until something forces us to rethink them, and maybe even change them. Worse, we often have to get hit pretty hard on the head to make us, wearily and reluctantly, take up the hard work of change. In modernist novellas such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illych, characters usually arrive at these great epiphanies as they are dying. They leave life horrified or radiant with understanding. I often find these endings moving. But, I once realized, they’re also convenient. Neither the character nor the author had to figure out how to live in the light of their new understanding.

So it’s good that we have this new kind of fiction. In postmodern experiments, the author–through his or her characters–can use an afterlife or multiple lives to work forward step by step, or life by life. Often, the characters move towards better choices. Better lives. Better selves.

So, I’m curious. If you were writing The Midnight Library, how would you resolve the plot question? Where and how would Nora wind up? What kind of life would she choose? Or, to put it another way, what lessons does she really need to learn?

And if you wound up in your own Midnight Library, what would you want the outcome to be?