Jesse Ball is a writer of formal mysteriousness and neon moral clarity. The author of fifteen books, he won the Plimpton Prize in 2008, had a title long-listed for the National Book Award in 2015, and made Granta’s bill of Best Young American Novelists in 2017. His language is spare, strange, and evocative, with a tugging indeterminism. A character might sway “as a child does, because the morning sways, because when it is morning, isn’t everything swaying?” This writing suggests not so much prose as plainsong—timeless, full of deceptive simplicity, and somehow, in its uncanniness, modal, rather than major or minor. In 2014, James Wood described Ball’s style as “chastely lyrical,” informed by the sacred. His themes are human savagery, often state-sanctioned, and human kindness, a thin thread of resistance.
Ball’s books distrust anything that reeks of a system. His novel “Silence Once Begun,” which hinges on a false confession, critiques the machinery of criminal justice. (In 2017, Ball wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times proposing that all Americans be forced to serve a jail sentence once every ten years, to “help ensure that the quality of life within our prisons is sufficient for the keeping of human beings.”) In “Census,” Ball’s best-reviewed work, the state has a vague, twentieth-century menace—government officials tattoo citizens on their lower ribs. Ball’s latest novel, “The Divers’ Game,” continues in this vein. The book imagines a society split into two classes: pats and quads. The pats carry gas masks and cannisters, and are permitted to kill the quads, who are marked by their branded cheeks and maimed hands, for any reason. The quads, refugees and their descendants, live in settlements ringed by guards.
Ball stages his story, across three chapters, in four acts, each imbued with the aspect of fable. The first section follows two teen-age pats, Lethe and Lois, as they attend history class, accompany their professor to the zoo (all animals but one are dead), and prepare for Ogias’ Day, a festival of the forgiving of debts. The second section, channelling Shirley Jackson, recounts a quad ritual in which a young girl is empowered to adjudicate her community’s disputes. In a third section, a group of adolescent quads play by the lake; one boy, whose father has paid for him not to be branded, is bullied into a deadly game. The final section is breathtaking: a pat woman’s letter to her husband, which contemplates the broken world and her place in it.
For much of the book, Ball happily immerses the reader in pat propaganda. Lois and Lethe are taught, during their history lecture, that “things done to those beneath are not properly violence,” that “we have hearts, we are . . . good and fair.” They watch a video about the “taking of the thumbs,” the procedure by which the quads are mutilated for swift identification. “You never want to be the sort of person who flinches from the work that is hard,” their professor says, and the narrator appears to agree. “Even if someone else does it for you, you must realize how hard it is, and how beautiful it is, how right, that it is done, and done well.” Ball maps the delusions of a society that lacks kindness but compulsively tells itself stories about its virtue. (In this, the resonances between his nameless country and our own seem unavoidable.) One woman, after killing a stranger for no good reason, grasps, finally, what Hannah Arendt would call the “banality of evil,” the way that cruelty can hide in plain sight, in the automated announcements on the subway, or on the street, where vendors hawk knockoff gas masks. Her life, she tells her husband, rests on a “violence so complete, it is like air.”
But such insight is an exception; most of these characters, corroded by complicity, can’t or won’t identify the source of their pain. Here, Ball’s guileless style serves as psychological characterization, conjuring people who long, above all, to remain blameless. The book often seems to be narrated by an educator, someone with a stake in rendering the world clean and comprehensible. “I could not tell them apart,” the narrator says, of Lois and Lethe. He then turns to the reader: “Have you ever met someone and felt they were a reflection of you? Have you felt reflected?” There is something chilling about this friendly, didactic nod to our presence. The book opens: “Lethe! If we look for her, if we run up the stairs, cast open her door, and look in her bed, she is not there. If we dash down the steps, turn a corner, pass her befuddled father (who cannot see us), and go to the little table that she loves so well, the one by the window, she is not there!” In using nursery-rhyme tones to convey a girl’s potentially troubling disappearance, Ball seems to be exploring the notion of false innocence, an innocence that turns away from suffering. This is innocence as willful naïveté—the opposite of moral courage. It is the innocence suggested by Lethe’s namesake, the mythical river whose waters cause forgetting.
Ball asks whether true innocence can exist in the society he imagines. This explains his novel’s deep interest in children. (“Census,” too, stresses the plight of the vulnerable in dystopia: its protagonist, a man with Down syndrome, is modelled after Ball’s brother, Abram, who died at the age of twenty-four.) In each vignette, young characters embody a range of instincts, mild and harsh, like little thought experiments in human nature. The quad girl, chosen to deliver verdicts on her neighbors, unfurls a red sleeve for guilt and a white one for mercy. She quickly intuits the audience’s preference: “More punishment . . . more hate. Always more, never less, that was the song.” Ball shows how a social order that excites destruction at empathy’s expense eventually consumes its own—and I worried, at times, that the book would likewise consume itself in moral outrage. Yet three of the novel’s four parables refuse resolution outright; the language, rich and inscrutable, is both a barrier to and a protest against certainty. One must conduct extracurricular research to uncover what Ball says is the simple aim of his fiction. “The effort,” he told The Rumpus, “is to decrease the general savagery of human behavior.”
Ball’s prescription on this front is familiar but affecting. The pats prove entranced by their sameness. (“It was almost as though they rubbed against one another all at once like cats.”) They cannot identify with the quads, and this failure to connect—to “bridge this pathetic buffer that keeps one mind from feeling the presence of another”—has separated their country from its soul. Ball figures the problem in the divers’ game of the title, in which a player must swim through an underground tunnel, narrow and treacherous, that connects two ponds. The implication is that empathy involves risk. In this metaphor, which feels ethereal and delicate in the book, death by suffocation—the same death promised by the gas—suggests a kind of smothering self-absorption. Ball’s whole society, it seems, is drowning in the river Lethe.
The novel’s focus on empathy may open it to charges of sentimentality, but there is little in “The Divers’ Game” to flatter the hope that people have any interest in treating each other well. Ball, instead, conveys a warm pity, or a mediated grace. Though a death closes each section, the last one, unlike the first three, expresses a fantasy of goodness, or even a template for refusal. Or perhaps it simply has the same effect as the girls’ history lecture, with its grisly video, at the end of which, Ball writes, “the lights came on, and suddenly everyone could see one another.”
