The Damage Done

January 1, 2022
What would the world be like if everyone suddenly lost the capacity to hurt each other? Sixth grader Dab, caught looking the wrong way at bullying classmate Connor's hair, tries everything he can to avoid getting beaten up, but the only thing that rescues him is Connor's mystifying inability to land a single punch. Social worker Ann escapes the latest beating by her abusive husband, Jake, when his fists are magically deflected from her body and face. The plan a pair of antisemites hatch to shoot up a neighborhood synagogue goes awry when their automatic weapons refuse to discharge bullets into their intended victims. Salvadorean refugee sisters Gabriela and Cristela, whose mother has warned them repeatedly about the human wolves who may attack the caravan in which they're traveling to the States, are saved when the wolves find themselves unable to lay a violent hand on them. The Empty Shell, an underground writer imprisoned for his writing against the Nation and its Dear Leader, finds his torturers utterly stymied. Can they come up with alternative, nonviolent tortures that will be equally effective? If people can no longer be harmed by other people, can they be harmed by the dogs their attackers set on them? Can they die in drownings their adversaries have arranged? And once everyone accepts the new regime, whose arrival is never assigned a cause, how will those freed from the possibility of acting violently and the threat of suffering violent action choose to live their lives? A memorial for the Last Victim to die before the epochal change and an extended epilogue showing the principals 10 years later answers some of these questions, but larger questions quite properly endure. Landweber pulls off a true rarity, a utopian fantasy that actually feels good.

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January 17, 2022
What if humans could no longer harm each other? That’s the intriguing premise of the unconvincing latest from Landweber (after The In Between), in which, out of the blue, violence is magically curtailed. Guns will still fire bullets, but if a gun is pointed at another, discharged ammunition just hangs “suspended in the air.” This strange development leads the Pope to consider whether the sixth commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”) is still needed, even though in the absence of an understanding of what exactly has happened, no one has any basis to believe the miracle is permanent. The change is recounted from a variety of perspectives, including that of Dab, a bullied student whose assailant’s fist never connects with Dab’s face because, against the bully’s will, it “unfolded, fingers unfurling like the petals of a flower at dawn.” Serious issues, such as whether an incarcerated murderer should be freed just because he couldn’t kill again, receive short shrift. This thought experiment is a head-scratching oddity. Agent: Stacy Testa, Writers House.