Nik Maack's Reviews > Sky Full of Elephants

** spoiler alert ** I bought the book because the premise was interesting. What would the world be like if all the white people in the world suddenly killed themselves? The answer this novel postulates: everything would be much better.

The novel mostly takes place one year after The Event. And most of the black people are actually much happier because now all of their oppressors are dead. You can go to the airport to catch a flight. There are no airlines. And you might have to wait a few days, but you can get a flight for free. Because people fly planes now for the love of flying. Uh... What?

Our main character Charlie was in prison when The Event happened. Suddenly all the guards were gone. The prisoners got out because families came and broke down the prison walls to save them.

Uh, excuse me? I have a question. What happened to the white people in prison? In this novel, there aren't any. It's not even raised as a possibility.

The reason everyone is happy now, with the white people dead, is because they are closer to their magic black spiritual connection to the earth. See, the reason the event happened is because a guy (the king of Alabama) made a machine that connects black people to their black energy and that made white people feel shitty and they all killed themselves. By walking into water and drowning.

I've read a few other reviews of this book that say the novel is meant to make you feel uncomfortable. That, they say, is the point.

What the reviewers don't address is that the book is profoundly dull. There's a lot of characters that talk at great length about black energy and knowing who you are and living in harmony with people. And it's so very boring. Utopia is dull. Characters struggling to understand and accept utopia is boring. A lot of this book is so very dull.

Sidney is half white and sometimes she wants to identify as white. Other times she has a mystical black experience and she wants to embrace her blackness. Because someone gave her a magic bath and then she could see her own beauty. Charlie, her father, also has a magic bath that gives him a flashback to his childhood. Magic baths? What? Yup. Magic baths.

I have seen reviewers justify all this by saying the book is "magic realism". Is it, though? The tone wobbles all over the place. The writing is painful. And much of it is super vague and inconsistent.

By the way. The book tells us there's no such thing as the white race. White is an idea. Which is confusing because all the white people killed themselves. You know, pink skinned humans. So if white is an idea, why did ALL the pink people die?

This book is the sort of novel where you either turn a blind eye to all the ridiculousness of it, or you put it down with a sigh and say, am I really expected to take any of this seriously?

All the white people died. But some parts of the country still use money. Which makes no sense because there would be a lot of money floating around so everyone would be rich so... Why would money have any value?

All the white people drowned themselves. Charlie ends up in the utopia of Alabama. When he's asked what he thinks of it, he says, "I can't explain it. Maybe there's something in the water."

For the life of me, I can't tell if the author made this joke on purpose, or if he didn't realize what he'd just said. Because throughout the book there's talk of beaches, water, lakes, the ocean being enormous cemeteries and things of horror. But many times this is just forgotten. Oh well. All the white people are dead. I guess that's just life now. I guess that's what happens when you get in touch with mystical black energy.

Fun theory: the book does have a lot of praise for marijuana and its mystical natural energy. Because nothing that comes from nature can be bad. If I had to guess, a lot of this book was inspired by getting high. Because a lot of it reads like a loose cluster of pipe dreams that do not hold together.

I cannot recommend this book and I honestly don't know why anyone would give it a positive review.