In This Novel, Death Is Obsolete. And Al Gore Is President.

HALCYON, by Elliot Ackerman

“It was a time when a frenzy pervaded the national psyche,” Elliot Ackerman’s narrator muses in the opening of his new novel, “Halcyon.” “We had lost our ability to disaggregate our values from our rage,” he continues. And finally, my favorite: “It would do nothing to ease our grim national mood, which I would have diagnosed as rage-ennui.”

Martin Neumann, the Nick Carraway-like observer serving as our tour guide to the times, is not speaking of 2023 but 2004 — four years into an Al Gore presidency. Like many contemporary authors (present company included and guilty), Ackerman attempts to explicate the full-spectrum meltdown of the social and political culture, his vehicle of choice alternate history with a science-fiction twist.

The most enjoyable element of any alt-history narrative is how the author plays with the reader’s relationship to that history. When you’re of a generation that has spent its entire adulthood yearning for an alternative to what we’ve lived, it is ever tempting to search for inflection points, moments that haunt us with what might have been or should have been or thankfully never came to pass. It’s endlessly fascinating to gaze at the strike-slip fault where the earthquake occurred.

The 2000 election, decided by 537 votes in a state run by the winning candidate’s younger brother, has that quality, as George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency makes it easy to fantasize about a Goretopia out there in the multiverse. However, Ackerman takes it a step further back, to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. In “Halcyon,” Bill Clinton made Nixonian recordings of his transgressions, and the release of the tapes led to his removal from office. This is the fulcrum of history by Ackerman’s estimation, and it’s hard to ignore his channeling of Philip Roth, not only in voice and tone but in the exploration of a thought experiment (“The Plot Against America”) and the meditation on scandal in the aftermath of Clinton’s transgressions (“The Human Stain”).

Yet this isn’t just an alternate political history; President Al Gore also conquers death. “Cryoregeneration” is a revolutionary procedure that resurrects the dead, and Neumann, a struggling history professor, finds himself witness to this controversial new technology when he realizes his friend, an elderly lawyer named Robert Abelson, is an early adopter. The Gatsby to Neumann’s Carraway, Abelson is the owner of the titular estate, Halcyon, where Neumann has secluded himself to finish his book on the Civil War.

Born in the particularly resonant year of 1914, Abelson is a veteran of World War II who returned home to become a lawyer, arguing in defense of Roe v. Wade, the Equal Rights Amendment and other progressive causes. He is the embodiment of the 20th century, its fight for civilization, its immense social progress and how it still came up drastically short.

Abelson was once a “champion of liberalism,” but “time … had conspired to leave him ideologically disenfranchised. His values had not evolved at a rapid enough pace and so he found himself stranded on the shoals of conservatism.”

As a historian, Neumann is a Shelby Foote guy, and believes that compromise has been core to the American character. This notion has gone terribly out of vogue in Gore’s America. (“When you commemorate Southern courage, who is asking who to compromise?” a fellow academic asks him.)

Neumann is sympathetic to Abelson as a product of his time, even though “few people are these days.” He understands that what’s happened to Abelson is what happens to all of us if we stick around long enough. Abelson, though, is sticking around much longer, having been brought back to life as a secret test case. When the undead hold on, they also hold on to their stale ideas.

After having his death certificate annulled, Abelson gets jammed up in a legal dispute over the inheritance he left to his three children. While the novel makes a passing glance at the titillating questions — Who aside from Abelson has been resurrected? Who will be able to afford it? What are the criteria for applying for a “rebirth grant”? — Ackerman prefers to approach the issue through a specious lawsuit against Abelson. The litigant is a woman claiming emotional trauma from a date Abelson arranged for her mother years ago. The story also hinges on efforts to remove a Confederate monument.

Characters and plot points weave in and out of these dual controversies, but the complicated accusation against Abelson is hampered by the low stakes. Whether or not his entitled children will inherit Halcyon does not exactly play out like a season of “Succession.” The reader cannot summon outrage for Abelson being wronged, nor schadenfreude that this embodiment of white patriarchy will finally get his.

Yet the fact that the novel doesn’t snap, that it barely even bends, and remains idiosyncratic and engrossing throughout, is a testament to Ackerman’s expert juggling act. We learn that it’s a headache to come back from the dead, and therein lies the rub of every seemingly miraculous technology that is introduced, debated, assimilated and rendered quaint in cycles that are now microgenerational. The ramifications of innovation never quite play out the way we anticipate, and therefore, when grappling with the immensity of defeating death, Ackerman intelligently forces the reader to think about the mundane, arcane territory of inheritance-threatening lawsuits.

Ultimately, Ackerman suggests that it is our own constant frustration and confrontation with history that threatens to drive us to a permanent state of rage-ennui, for history is not easily derailed. In the 2004 election, Bush emerges victorious thanks to Gore’s ill-advised pardon of Clinton. Playing to his evangelical base, Bush scraps the cryoregeneration program. This feels like Ackerman’s most flagrant challenge to all dreams of alternate history: Gore won, literally cured death, and the very next election people voted for the other guy anyway.

In the end, the novel concludes, we will make all the same mistakes, vote for all the wrong people or ignore the opportunities at hand even when we vote for the right ones. History muscles its way back, an unthinking, unfeeling set of forces that proves more difficult to repair — let alone reverse — than death itself.

Stephen Markley is an author and a screenwriter. His novels include “Ohio” and “The Deluge.”

HALCYON | By Elliot Ackerman | 237 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28