The Secret
by Eve Hoffman
New York: Public Affairs, 2002.
ISBN 1-58648-150-9. $25 US.
Reviewed by George Gessert
In Eva Hoffmans 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 Manhattans 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 mothers 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 dont 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 Wallaces 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 wont produce baby Hitlers or perfect soldiers, just princesses
and emotional cripples.
The book that The Secret brings most to mind is Michel Houellebecqs
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 Iriss 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.