A particular talent of Walter Tevis was writing about despair. Despair not necessarily as a rational response to tragic events, but as a sort of inexorable force that has no singular cause and thus, no identifiable solution. His science fiction has clear, straightforwardly exposited plots, but the stories underneath are of deep sadness, isolation and loneliness, and the difficulty of sustaining hope.

Tevis was quite aware that he was writing about, and from, his personal experiences of despair. Here he is talking about his earlier novel*:
Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth is about my becoming an alcoholic, really. That’s my private story about my sense of my own physical weakness and my sense of my not really being human.

And on the writing of Mockingbird:
I was writing out of my own suicide attempt—I had a couple of them.

Mockingbird is set in a fairly distant future, when humans have outsourced virtually everything to robots, become illiterate, and drugged themselves into oblivion; amidst this waste, a man discovers reading, a woman lives sober and clear-headed, and an intelligent android who is deeply tired of running everything wants to end his own life. To me, it felt like close kin to Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven. Both novels are given a clear-cut, intriguing premise which qualify them as sci-fi, but are really just about people, and feel very relevant and familiar. Both are of moderate length and are highly readable. Both feature protagonists who feel helpless in the face of vast forces that nearly everyone else in the world is incapable of perceiving - in The Lathe of Heaven, the effect of human choices that are intended as benign but result in great unforeseen harm; in Mockingbird, the cumulative weight of centuries of cultivated ignorance and incuriosity.

Despite what I said initially, this novel isn't just a long slog of unhappiness. The setting is interesting, and there's a satisfying element of having layers peeled away to reveal the state of society and the events that have led to it. There is a journey of discovery on the part of the character who learns to read - Bentley - and an adventure story that comes from his increasingly passionate quest to gain knowledge and, thereby, agency. It's a fun read, easy to devour in a couple of sittings.

It's also an interesting take on where ignorance could take us. In this future, most of humanity has forsaken doing and learning and lulled itself into insensibility. It's not as complete a vision as perhaps we might want - partially a matter of the 40 years since the book's writing, I think; machine learning and media-driven stupidity are such real things to us, for example - but I think it works as a premise, and I buy Tevis's own explanation (emphasis mine):

Mockingbird does sometimes, I think, weaken into an attack solely on television and on the modern world, and “weaken” I say because I’m not completely convinced of all those things that I say. But what I am convinced of is that it is very bad for people to find substitutes for living their lives, and that’s what I hope I do say, and say well, from time to time in the book.

But what most struck me, as with The Man Who Fell to Earth, was how Tevis used his science-fictional premise to depict with aching familiarity the muffled deadness of depression. It's hard to describe; it's some effect of the characters' learnings and discoveries, the events and experiences, cumulatively providing a line of sight into a feeling, or set of feelings, that is usually so banal as to be difficult to look at in any sort of novel way. I wish I could explain better.

Or as Tevis himself said: "I don’t necessarily demand that people understand it that way, but that’s what it means to me."


* All the quotes I've used here are from this excellent interview with Tevis in Brick