Some light spoilers ahead…
J. Michael Straczynski’s Together We Will Go is a frustrating read. It tackles a provocative subject in an interesting way, but the book does not rise to the promise of its concept.
Roughly a dozen strangers board a cross-country bus headed from Miami to San Francisco, all with the intention of committing suicide at their destination. Each of their reasons is different, running the gamut from understandable (a woman with chronic pain) to sympathetic (a black woman bullied for her weight) to pitiable (an older man with a dark secret) to pathetic (a college student who wants to say “fuck you” to the world). These folks are brought together by a failed writer named Mark who, at first glance, wants to turn their road-trip into a posthumous story about why they were “checking out early.”
The book’s main conceit, that it’s an epistolary collection of journals and audio transcriptions, is its main strength. No one segment lasts longer than a few pages, making it a breezy pick up/put down kind of read, and the story flows so quickly that you’ll want to devour large portions in one sitting.
There are moments of sad beauty, the most affecting of which involves a character named Zeke. There’s poetry to how some of the passenger’s plights are handled and to their philosophizing. Unfortunately, these moments don’t compensate for how stilted the characters are portrayed nor the conventional turns the story takes near the end.
Part of the reason for this may be that Straczynski, a science-fiction screenwriter and comic author in his mid-60s, is writing primarily millennial-aged people in a modern world setting. While all the characters are distinctly defined in a broad sense, their journal entries are all flowery and their banter unnatural. It’s like they’re written by someone who doesn’t understand how the kids today speak. This is extremely evident when the story swings into more taboo areas, like sex and drug use, which lead to some unintentionally hilarious moments.
And though his heart is in the right place, the story comes off shallower than I’d have liked given the subject matter. Very little time is spent on how the passenger’s decisions will affect those left behind, which would seem an important aspect to a tale about killing yourself, and makes their motivations seem more selfish than I think was intended. The lack of nuance in how suicide is portrayed may unintentionally make it seem like just another choice, which could be a disastrous message to some readers. This is remedied somewhat in the end, as several characters leave the bus for different reasons (and one remains despite second thoughts), but the road there makes a lot of this seem more reasonable than it should.
This is, of course, a matter of perspective, and provoking this kind of debate may be a good thing, but it also feels like playing with fire. To his credit, the author sneaks the National Suicide Hotline’s phone number into the story and concludes the book with a disclaimer.
As for where all the characters end up, it’s a mixed bag. The largest spoiler I’ll offer is that Mark, whose actions are the catalyst of the story, is rejected by the group before their trip ends. While it’s arguable there is no main character it ‘s still weird for him not to see the whole thing through, or at least pop-up afterwards to give some closure to his ambitions. Another character is also robbed of their agency by story’s end and has a pretty underwhelming about face given how confidently their suicidal ideation is defined. I’d also offer that the final leg of the bus trip is anticlimactic despite several of the characters making good on their intended purpose.
Together We Will Go is a misfire, but a noble one. I don’t regret my time with it and appreciate how thought-provoking the experience was.
Earnest Notions 