Jim Crace. Genesis.(Book Review)

Jim Crace. Genesis. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.246 pp. $23.00.

For the last two decades Jim Crace's rich corpus has explored how traditional systems of meaning evolve during times of large-scale socioeconomic change. What's especially interesting about Crace's treatment of meaning is his adherence to a strictly naturalist and materialist worldview. His previous full-length novel, Being Dead (2000), was an extended meditation on love and death. His new novel, Genesis, can be read as a complementary meditation on love and paternity. The narrative follows the romances of an actor named Felix Dern (a.k.a. Lix), who conceives a child with every woman he has ever been physical with: "every kiss produced a child.... Fertile Lix had never slept with anyone without--eventually--a pregnancy. There was always an aftermath for him." As is typical in Crace's work, the setting for this story is a fictional, vaguely European city. Its volatile economy and its apparently successful mass-entertainment industry ...