The Game of Life

by Tess Crain

This essay appears in Issue 4 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Yellow Switch Palace

by David Bingham

Expat Press, 258 pp., $16.00

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When a part of your body falls asleep, does it dream? David Bingham’s Yellow Switch Palace makes you wonder. Half speculative tech caper, half teen-angst picaresque, the debut novel is a study in numbness both physical and existential—as well as the hallucinatory potential of detachment—from its first sentence: “When I come to, my head is on my wrist, and my wrist is on the window, and has fallen asleep so many times during the bus ride that it’s starting to flutter when I reach for things.” The narrator, Andrew, has returned home to the Washington metropolitan region, or DMV, for winter break. A college junior, he has no idea what he wants to do in life beyond serving as a Residential Advisor in a new dormitory next semester and trying to not smoke weed. Compensatorily abusing cigarettes, booze, and—for the second half of the book—opiates, he experiences his life as if lived in an IKEA, passively if grudgingly following a prescribed path through spaces that feel at once familiar and computer-generated; trying—as he sits at strange tables and lies on strange beds—to picture his future fuller, more organized, more adult; increasingly resentful of his companions, doubtful of his own taste, and desperate to go yet too depleted to leave.