Review: A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen

Review by Bryan Miller

A Beginning at the End
Mike Chen
Mira Books, January 2020.
$26.99; 400pp.
ISBN: 978-0-77830-934-5

Now is exactly the time for Mike Chen’s brand of pandemic novel. Much how his debut Here and Now and Then used a time travel narrative to explore the importance of family, his sophomore effort A Beginning at the End uses an apocalyptic backdrop to return to this same theme. Except Chen’s apocalyptic novel is decidedly non-apocalyptic, eschewing many of the tropes that have made the genre so popular. Leaning much closer to Station Eleven rather than The Stand, the novel picks up six years after a virus killed 70% of the world’s population. Empty, barren wastelands filled with looter gangs and desperate survivors are sliding into the rearview mirror. In their place are traumatized survivors attempting to find normalcy as they navigate their way through a society intent on rebuilding itself. Chen’s novel asks what happens to people after a catastrophe brings the world to a halt and forces everyone to start over. The answer, it seems, lies in our capacity for human connection.

The novel primarily follows three characters in a partially restored San Francisco. There’s Rob, a widowed father struggling to raise his young daughter Sunny under strict government guidelines; Moira, a former pop star who doesn’t want anyone knowing she was a pop star; and Krista, a wedding planner and event coordinator more concerned with making another buck than making friends. When circumstances bring them together, they have to reconcile their past and the traumas they’ve left hidden there. Trauma is a central concern of the story; Chen is much more interested in exploring each character’s own internal wreckage rather than the metropolitan wreckage of societal collapse. And while he makes a point of arming the world with some familiar dystopian trappings—there are plenty of empty freeways, abandoned cars, and burnt out husks that used to be buildings—that isn’t the defining characteristic. Rather, it’s PASD—Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. It hangs heavily over the narrative Chen draws, informing both the world-building and the characters’ backstories. In Chen’s pandemic-stricken America, the emotional trauma generated by the virus poses more of a risk to social stability than the virus itself, preventing people from seeking out others to create families of their own. Without some version of the nuclear family unit and the children being raised in them, society can’t recover. Enter the Family Stability Board, an agency empowered to protect the most important resource: the children being raised in this new era. When they threaten to take Sunny away from Rob, he’s forced to confront the trauma the virus has created and the lies he told. When these lies propel her from the only home she’s known, Rob—aided by Krista and Moira—pursue her to Seattle. Each of Chen’s characters are on a collision course where they have to confront the various traumas assailing their lives. And as the novel progresses, much of that trauma feels eerily familiar.

I can’t talk about this novel without mentioning our own pandemic. Given the current climate around COVID-19, some similarities between Chen’s world and ours is uncanny—frequent hand washing is considered the norm, and most everyone wears face masks. There’s an anxiety around it that already feels recognizable; when Krista takes off her mask to drink tea at a café, she’s castigated by a passerby. And when a mutant strain of the virus begins spreading, this anxiety is only heightened. Desperate to slow the spread of this new strain, people are ordered to self-quarantine, many businesses—including the Family Stability Board, one of the most essential agencies—begin sending its employees home. This new society is shutting down in a similar fashion we are experiencing. While nobody mentions the phrase shelter in place, it still gives Chen’s book an uncomfortable amount of realism. And while heightened, somewhat stereotypical aspects of dystopia exist in the liminal spaces of the story, they’re never the focus. You’ll find mentions of survivors traversing abandoned terrain in search of food and ammunition in the histories of his characters, but they’re unimportant compared to the other territory the plot covers, and it’s this unimportance that makes these familiar fixtures of apocalyptic fiction feel fresh in Chen’s hands. His priority instead is in people rediscovering normalcy and ordinariness while remembering to wash their hands throughout the day. It makes the novel feel hurled straight from the current zeitgeist, despite technically preceding it. Does that make the novel a few months ahead of its time? Possibly. Regardless, Chen’s ability to anticipate the anxieties and social mores of pandemic life renders the story more effective. But this efficacy doesn’t just stem from its sense of realism and likeness to our own day to day, but rather, the germane message at the heart of it—overcoming trauma through human connection in a world torn apart by a pandemic.

It’s a message many of us could benefit from right now. “We mourn, we rebuild, we respect the things we have,” one character says in the latter half of the novel. The sentiment isn’t expressly reserved for material possessions, but rather, it’s aimed at the importance of recovering a sense of community. And in Chen’s book, community is the mechanism in which trauma is traversed and confronted; none of the characters could accomplish what they accomplish had they braved it alone. This idea contrasts with a country emptied out by the pandemic, one made to feel lonelier, more alien, where some communities find strength in isolation. The bonds Rob, Moira, and Krista forge while living in San Francisco and trekking together to Seattle, serve as a rebuke against the mercenary existence the pandemic demanded from them. In this way, the book feels like seeing a light at the end of our own tunnel, especially in a climate where most of us have been in self-isolation for well over a month. It feels like a balm for our specific cultural moment, one none of us anticipated needing.

The novel ends with a call to action. It’s another instance of Chen tapping into the zeitgeist before the zeitgeist fully formed. After Uncle Dean, a doctor spearheading the pandemic response, reiterates that nobody wants to reenter quarantine and that staying ahead of the virus is the only way to save lives, he goes onto say:

“There is no new normal. It’s going to keep changing, keep escaping from us. And our world needs everyone to know, to step up right now. Complacency isn’t an option. We have to move forward. We can’t waste a single second.”

He’s right. Complacency isn’t an option. We all have to be on the same page for us to minimize the casualties coronavirus is already causing; one half of the country can’t do it alone. But that’s one of the points of the novel—hardship can’t be traversed alone. And what affects one affects the other. While some of us feel alone right now, the novel assures us a sense of community will be recovered—try as it might, the pandemic can’t take that away from us.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Bryan Miller ended up in Santa Cruz, CA, where he graduated from UCSC with a degree in Creative Writing. These days, he’s a production coordinator for the Bay Area commercial film scene. He’s very much looking forward to returning to set when the pandemic is over. Until then, he’s catching up on his reading. Follow him on Twitter at @bmiller808.