Onyx reviews: Inspection by Josh Malerman

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 04/08/2019

As experiments go, you have to admire the ambition behind a plan to raise boys and girls in separate environments, unaware of the existence of the other gender. It's a huge commitment, but Richard and Marilyn (known to their young charges as D.A.D. and M.O.M.) believe that, by removing the distracting influence of sexual attraction, they can rear their charges to excel academically.

Inspection feels like a dystopian novel like The Handmaids Tale or The Death House, but it is set in the present day in the real world. The two buildings are only a few miles from each other in a somewhat remote wooded area; their secret existence is one of the book's many farfetched notions. The only element of the novel that is at all speculative or futuristic is a game called Boats that operates as the world's most effective lie detector.

For reasons known only to themselves, Richard and Marilyn name their 52 test subjects after the letters of the alphabet. There are male and female A through Z, although the male A and Z and the female J have all been "sent to the corner" permanently after acquiring forbidden knowledge. Cast out of the garden of Eden, in other words, although readers won't be surprised to discover that they haven't simply been banished.

By reducing his large cast of characters to letters, which makes them intrinsically more difficult to remember, Malerman has to resort to some rather heavy-handed, paper-thin characterization. J is the one good at this, D is better at that, Q is this, etc. The children are now approaching puberty, the difficult years, when their personalities might radically change overnight. They are subjected to routine Inspections (hence the title) under the guise of screening for jabberwocky-sounding diseases when they are, in fact, being scrutinized to see if they have been "spoiled" by forbidden knowledge.

Because the kids can't be given real books that have people of both genders, each group leader has enlisted a disenfranchised and greedy writer to churn out single-gendered adventure tales with strong moral lessons reminiscent of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. These writers have indentured themselves for years to this project with the promise of money beyond their wildest dreams, but after nearly a decade of servitude, cracks are beginning to show. The male author, frustrated by the lack of creativity and freedom in the books he has to write for the boys, churns out a revelatory tome that he intends to distribute to them surreptitiously.

At the same time, over in the girls' tower, one girl, K, caught a glimpse of the spire from the second tower and becomes obsessed by it. She is intrepid and resourceful, embarking on a series of reconnaissance missions that will ultimately bring this carefully constructed "utopia" crashing down in a fiery conclusion reminiscent of The Lord of the Flies crossed with a slasher film.

The idea of keeping the genders ignorant of each other's existence is intriguing, but rather narrow in its focus. We know that gender isn't binary, but Inspection doesn't admit the possibility that some of the boys or girls might become attracted to one another, for example. In fact, that eventuality would have been far more interesting than showing a boy and a girl discovering each other for the first time and immediately feeling the temptation to kiss.

The book reveals less about the experiment itself than about the mindsets of the two people who would go to such extremes. They attribute their abject failures up to that point in their lives to the distracting influence of attraction, love, intimacy, so they decide to test this hypothesis on dozens of unwitting suspects. It's interesting that Malerman also doesn't consider that even one of these 52 kids might not excel at anything. The selection process doesn't appear to have been terribly exclusive, so one would expect a significant proportion of lower IQ subjects.

M.O.M. and D.A.D. had anticipated a possible rebellion when the The Alphabet Boys and Alphabet Girls reached the age of twenty. They underestimated their young charges badly, although the insurrection comes together much more quickly than seems credible, given the sheltered lives these kids have lived.