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The Secret

by Eve Hoffman
New York: Public Affairs, 2002.
ISBN 1-58648-150-9. $25 US.

Reviewed by George Gessert

In Eva Hoffman’s novel The Secret, a young woman named Iris Suffolk discovers that she is a clone. She reacts by leaving her mother and embarking on a journey of discovery. She visits the laboratory where she was created, confronts the scientist who cloned her, reconnects with her grandparents (who are genetically her parents), and discovers the uses of sex. All this takes place in a near-future very much like the present.

Iris is blonde, beautiful, and intelligent. From earliest childhood she knows that she is extraordinary, even though no one tells her how she was created. Her sense of self-worth comes to some extent with the upper-middleclass turf that her family occupies: her grandparents live on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, and her mother is a highly paid investment consultant. Iris’ smother "thought the world belonged to her and that she could only improve it... She had the right ideas, the right values and the right strategies. It followed that she should have what she wanted. She had me."

When Iris finds out that she is a clone her sense of specialness is confirmed and magnified, but abruptly darkens. She feels unnatural and two-dimensional, empty, without mystery. She suspects that her feelings are programmed, that her very existence is a "ludicrous joke."

At first Iris had my sympathy, but it was soon eclipsed by dislike. She is too much her mother’s daughter. Her mother instructs Iris to prize her "selfish gene" and to think of other people as her inferiors, so she proceeds into the world without the faintest sense of connection or obligation to anyone except herself. Her alienation and self-hatred provide her with handy excuses to exploit others, which she does with no leaven of joy, or even glee. As asexual predator she displays excruciatingly good taste. Her betrayals are never crude. She unerringly chooses men who are weaker or emotionally less cunning than she is, but who are of her own class, preferably academics. Suffering does not lead Iris to risk compassion, even for other clones, some of whom she eventually meets. What separates her from the people she passes on the street is less that she is a clone, than her trust account.

Iris hates the human race. Misanthropy can be a door to the larger world, but Iris never considers that even if humanity has little to recommend it, she has connections with the community of life through the plants, insects, and other organisms that reproduce vegetatively or parthenogenically. Nonhumans don’t count to her, except as imagery and symbols. She gradually reveals herself to be a limited and all-too-familiar type of person, someone like David Foster Wallace’s protagonist in The Depressed Person, who siphons off life energies of people she encounters, and through immense mental exertion keeps the world at bay. However, unlike the depressed person, Iris seems to resolve her problems. With disturbing ease, Iris achieves a "normal" life, that is an upper middle-class existence complete with loving partner, satisfying sex, renewed communication with her mother, and even a trip to Southern France. She feels empathy for her partner and traces of concern for some of the people she encounters. But she sees her new life as following a formulaic plot line, which makes her achievements ambiguous, perhaps hollow. All in all, Iris presents powerful evidence against human cloning: it won’t produce baby Hitlers or perfect soldiers, just princesses and emotional cripples.

The book that The Secret brings most to mind is Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles. Both novels deal with the nuclear family as it disintegrates. Houellebecq and Hoffman create characters freed by circumstances to pursue selfishness so single-minded that it seems to be a harbinger of a new stage of culture. This brave new world in the making will not be higher than the present, and not necessarily even very different. Only fashions, popular consumer items, and a few details of technology have changed in Iris’s world. Hoffman suggests that the social agreements and belief systems that will allow human beings to create themselves in laboratories will necessarily emphasize genetics, and will cause people to see themselves as matter embedded in matter, as highly complex expressions of an unliving universe. This is hardly a new vision, but we can expect that the last veils of Judeo-Christian culture, which since Descartes have discreetly covered at least portions of the human machine, will be torn away to reveal people like Iris.

The Secret deserves wide readership for exploring ramifications of human cloning. However, the book has weaknesses. I was disappointed by what Iris found in the art galleries of the future. There she sees "organic art" that "seemed to seep into the physical world from eerie old legends or bad dreams", animals with extra heads or limbs, chimeras, and cross-species composites that are "sort of alive and sort of not." None of this goes much beyond what already exists, or for that matter what Stapled on foresaw in 1930.

A more serious problem is that Iris confuses cloning with creating life from inorganic materials. This conveys her desperation, and the threat that biotechnology poses to her self-concept. However, why she must anguish melodramatically over the possibility that her origin and innermost being may consist, like everything else, of matter and energy, Hoffman never makes clear. Iris never pauses to consider that if humans are beings without souls and consist only of atoms, we are still so improbable as to constitute miracles. Bolts of lightning are no less awesome because we know that they are not thrown by Zeus. True, major social quandaries arise from defining ourselves as exceedingly complicated material phenomena. For example, if we are only material phenomena, our actions may be very complexly predetermined, in which case how can any of us, including the most criminal, be held accountable for what we do? However, Iris is not concerned with social organization or justice. She is single-mindedly concerned with herself and with achieving power. This may explain her yearnings for traditional anthropocentric constructions of the world. She abhors the possibility that she is part of the universe.

As I write this, reports come in daily about babies who may or may not have been cloned by the Raelians. Even if every country in the world outlaws human cloning, it will not go away. The Secret is a timely book that risks much and provides a starting point for imagining a future that may already be born. However, what makes The Secret disturbing is not so much cloning, or the selfishness embedded in our genes and proteins, as the selfishness specific to privileged Americans today. Most readers of Leonardo will recognize Iris and cringe, not only because there is something of her in all of us, but because she invariably finds a way to justify herself. She never allows herself to become entirely human.

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Updated 2nd February 2003


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