Review: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
In Dark Matter, main character Jason Dessen is a former physicist who specialized in quantum mechanics and superposition. He was brilliant, on his way to a breakthrough when life got in the way. Now he has a wife and teenage son, and he teaches at a small Chicago college. He loves his family. But sometimes he wonders what life would have been like. What could he have accomplished? Where could his wife’s art have gone if she too didn’t abandon her career?
One night, walking home from a party celebrating his old roommate’s Nobel-like prize, Jason is kidnapped by a man in a mask. The man knows a lot about Jason and his life. The man says he’s giving Jason a chance to have everything, then he drugs Jason.
Did I mention Jason loves his family? Because my god does he love his family. Or at least he says he loves them. A lot. Way too much. Not only is Jason’s entire motivation throughout the whole novel loving his family and wanting to return home to them. It is also the summation of his whole personality. Dude has nothing else going on in his head. He’s such a blank slate, he’s like sugar-free vanilla ice cream. I can’t tell you anything about him except he’s a man determined to return to his wife and son. The book says he loves them, so he must in fact love them.
For the most part, this lack of any sort of characterization for the main character and narrator is surprisingly okay. There’s only one secondary character that’s given any depth, and unfortunately they’re relegated to a role that for a good stretch of the novel is crucial, and then they disappear. It’s like Crouch realized he had written one interesting character and felt the need to get them out of the narrative as quickly as possible lest they overshadow Jason and his laser-focused arc.
Having a cast of flat characters is not ideal. This forces the reader automatically care less about the stakes of the book. But the narrative is still functional. And it largely succeeds in weaving an engaging plot dealing while making the intricacies of quantum mechanics and the multiverse theory digestible. At the same time, the prose is nothing remarkable and would appeal to any college professor’s idea of “good writing.” Crouch doesn’t linger in scenes, has an almost mathematical ratio of flashbacks, scenes, and introspection. All told, Dark Matter from a mechanical perspective is very by-the-numbers.
That doesn’t mean Dark Matter is without surprises. The narrative has two clear, major twists. The first can be spotted unless the reader has never experienced any sci-fi adjacent media (you can even figure it out from my spoiler-free summary above), the second one changes the scope and pacing of the novel, ratcheting up the tension when the story needs it most. This intensity in the last quarter of the novel ensures that Dark Matter is a quick popcorn read that makes complex, mind-bending scientific theory absorbable and capable of carrying a story. Dark Matter feels like it’s destined for a movie, and I can’t help but wonder if that was Crouch’s endgame from the start.
