If there is a cosmic force out there distributing talents, it seems to have given them all to David Cronenberg. His debut novel, Consumed (2014), demonstrates that, not only is he an amazing filmmaker–the genius behind masterpieces like Shivers (1975) and The Brood (1979) among many others–but he’s also an incredibly talented writer. Consumed offers bold and original insights on geriatric sexuality and the aesthetics of cancer. You’re probably thinking that these topics don’t sound like fun; and, in anyone else’s hands, they probably wouldn’t be. But Cronenberg weaves his observations on serious subjects into a plot so bizarre and propulsive that you can’t put it down. It also helps that many of the meditations on aging and illness are voiced through Aristide Arosteguy, who is, at least for my money, one of the most fascinating literary characters of the last few decades. There are some problems, of course: Consumed consists of parallel stories and one is much stronger than the other. Also, the novel’s riddled with technical jargon and dated by the narrator’s endless wonder at the possibilities of the internet, a tendency that, in a few years, might be pleasantly nostalgic. Overall, though, these are minor issues in an entertaining and incandescently brilliant book. 

Consumed follows the exploits of Nathan and Naomi, NYC-based journalists who travel the globe in search of sensational stories. Because their reporting takes them to different parts of the world, their romantic relationship is heavily mediated by technology, consisting mostly of skype calls, emails, and texts with the occasional in-person meeting in layover cities. Cronenberg is clearly fascinated by the disembodied and uniquely modern nature of their connection, which exemplifies one of his trademark obsessions–the cyborgification of humans and the impact of this transformation on intimacy. But Nathan and Naomi aren’t the focal points of the novel; they’re interfaces that allow us to access the much more interesting narratives of their respective subjects. 

As a crime writer, Naomi is pursuing the case of Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, famous French philosophers who are known for their eccentric personalities, political activism, and vaguely Marxist Philosophy of Consumerism. When photographs of Célestine’s masticated body parts appear online, the media account is that Aristide–probably in some kind of sex ritual–has murdered and cannibalized his wife before fleeing France for Asia. Receiving a tip that the Philosopher is in Tokyo, Naomi is determined to interview him. 

While she’s investigating the gold standard of scandal, Nathan is after something a little less exciting. After contracting Roiphe’s disease, a not-too-serious but definitely gross STI, he travels to Toronto to meet the doctor for whom the infection is named. What was originally supposed to be an article on medical fame or infamy–how does it feel to have your name attached to a sexually transmitted infection?–quickly turns into a larger project, as Dr. Roiphe proposes that Nathan write a book about his current research interest: his own daughter, Chase, and her nighttime theatrics. At first, Nathan and Naomi seem to be on completely separate tracks. But their paths ultimately converge on one grand and bizarre story–astonishing in its complexity and international scope–of sexual, technological, and geopolitical intrigue. 

Aristide Arosteguy is one of my favorite characters in recent literature and the dark star of this novel. Pushing all the buttons, his tale of philosophy, sex, and cannibalism is bound to be more titillating than anything Dr. Roiphe and his troubled daughter could offer. Yet, while I was initially drawn to him by Naomi’s summary of his tabloid-worthy exploits, I was surprised to find myself hanging on every word of his later interview for entirely different reasons. He’s an attractive character, not because his behavior is shocking, but because it’s so thoroughly ordinary and recognizable. 

Cronenberg subverts our expectations with dramatic flair by having Arosteguy hide out in a house fit for a monster. When Naomi arrives at his address in Tokyo, she finds a small two-story structure that’s mildewed and crumbling; its cramped yard is strewn with trash, crowded with dead plants, and haphazardly illuminated by a sick orange light. Skillfully translating European gothic conventions to an Asian urban setting in which space is at a premium, he prepares us for an encounter with a murderous madman. But as Naomi quickly discovers, underneath his crazy overgrowth of hair, the Philosopher is quite sane and fully devoted to Célestine. If we can forget the fact that he’s suspected of segmenting and consuming her body–and I did because that’s how sincere his affection seems– then his complete commitment to his wife and her often nutty priorities is genuinely touching. 

His love is not the boundless, idealistic passion that you might expect from a stereotypical French Philosopher. Instead, what makes him such an original and sympathetic character is that his attachment to Célestine is deeply grounded in the day-to-day habits of a 40 year marriage and based on their mutual desire for stability. As he explains to Naomi, he and Célestine understood the intensity of each others’ intellectual processes and knew that, if left unchecked, their individual obsessions would destroy the relationship. So to balance their need for freedom and security, the couple organized their enthusiasms, permitting each other a certain number of fixations per year with guaranteed spousal support. Which means that, for example, if Célestine were in the depths of mania, he would join her there, championing her interests no matter how bizarre. This commitment strikes me as very loving and–given their periodic zealousness–eminently practical. Aristide offers many details like this–descriptions of comforting routines and patterns of behavior that he and Célestine developed over decades of intimacy. So I came to the interview expecting a twisted tale of sex cult murder and stayed for the sensible love lessons which were, to my surprise, much more interesting. 

In Arosteguy, Cronenberg offers a remarkably layered character–one who challenges my assumptions about killers, playboy professors, and artsy academic power couples. (And, yes, since graduate school, I have theories about how such pairings work). I feel uneasy liking a man–even a purely fictional one–who is supposed to have dismembered his wife, because what does this say about me and my purported values? But Cronenberg–as is his style–makes me sit with this discomfort. 

It’s Cronenberg’s propensity to cultivate anxiety and even embarrassment that makes him the perfect person to take up a subject rarely explored in literature–the romantic and sexual lives of the elderly–a topic on which media, in all of its forms, is particularly squeamish. Through Arosteguy, we get a close-up look at an aging couple. As he and Célestine face a growing number of physical limitations, they become more intentional and creative in their lovemaking, more expansive in their definitions of attractiveness, and, ultimately, more forgiving of each other’s failings. Arosteguy describes how they make accommodations to give each other pleasure and meditates on the increasingly important role of adaptation in their sexuality. Does their need for constant adjustment and compromise put them in dialogue with the disabled community? And how might discourses from that community help them to explain and improve their own sexual experiences? Cronenberg deals with these questions in surprising depth and with great sensitivity. 

I found it difficult to turn from Arosteguy’s often solemn reflections to Chase Roiphe’s juvenile provocations. Nathan’s story can’t compete with Naomi’s because his subject embodies and embellishes one of the most obnoxious stock figures in fiction and film: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (For this discussion, you might want to go ahead and cue up the MPDG’s siren song, Train’s “Drops of Jupiter”) In a set-piece of quirkiness that establishes her character, Chase–at the moment of meeting Nathan–invites him to “diagnose” her and offers an unsolicited piece of private medical information: She is her father’s patient. While I would receive this mode of address as sad or even threatening, Nathan finds it unconventionally attractive, a response totally in-keeping with the conflicted desires of male protagonists in the late ‘90s, who read marks of mental illness–depression, anxiety, mania, and so on–as signs of free-spirited femininity. By these standards, Chase is sexy, indeed! With her unpredictable hostility, inane giggling, and quaint expressions (“oh gosh”), she aims for a whimsicality that makes my teeth grind. As you would expect, Cronenberg’s MPDG is extreme and inflected by his signature sub-genre, body horror. Still, if you disregard her skin eating performances–and even these, as she tells a friend, are contrived for the sake of “kitschy drama”–Chase is just another version of Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). 

It’s worth noting that, coming at the tail end of the trend, Clementine is supposed to deconstruct the trope; and I suspect that Cronenberg, too, may be attempting to undermine it, albeit in a different way: Rather than working harder to naturalize the antics of the MPDG, he foregrounds it’s theatricality. Indeed, while Nathan is charmed by Chase’s pretense of instability, he’s fully aware that her weirdness is a high-maintenance pose. Instead of being the unconscious expressions of a psychopathology–symptoms she simply can’t control–her “zany” behaviors are, he suspects, part of a deliberate performance put on for the enjoyment of men–first her father and now him. Rather than uncritically buying into her act, he observes that she’s “[p]retending to be a child.” Her voice demonstrates an “exaggerated musicality” and her art is “desperately provocative.” In other words, she’s trying too hard. His detection of this artifice is an improvement over the stunned fascination that grunge-era male protagonists exhibit when they see women dancing in the rain or wearing loud socks. Still, this very slight critical distance isn’t enough to make Cronenberg’s interpretation palatable for me. Fortunately, unlike Arosteguy, who takes full first-person control over entire chapters, Chase’s character is always third person, and our access to her voice is limited to the relatively brief exchanges that she has with Nathan. Cronenberg never lets her take the wheel, and the book is better for it. 

If you’re reading this novel less for characterization and more for textual riffs on Cronenberg’s typically visual preoccupations, then you’ll find plenty to enjoy. Throughout Consumed, two of his favorite themes–the sexualization of disease and the technologization of the human body–are prominent, and each hits a little differently in 2024. Nowadays, it seems like everyone has or knows someone who has cancer. And if you don’t, then you may have a voyeuristic relationship with one of the thousands of cancer patient influencers on TikTok and YouTube. These content creators take you through the moment of their diagnosis, the sometimes graphic progress of their disease, and the treatments that leave them sick, bald, and maimed. In other words, cancer and its effects are fully mainstream. Anticipating this proliferation of images, Cronenberg suggests that cancer’s signature swellings of lymph nodes and tumors might–either through a fleeting trend or a longer term evolutionary development–alter Western aesthetics of beauty; and that possibility, as completely screwed up as it is, seems particularly relevant now at a time when healthy women are using filler and prosthetics to distend their faces and bodies.

While Cronenberg’s discussions of cancer feel timely, his fixation on the cyborg seems dated. The supplementation of our bodies with technology has become so ubiquitous, accelerated, and invasive that, from our current vantage point, his observations made in 2014 seem quaint. He devotes page after page to the disembodiment of his characters’ lives and explains in painstaking detail how they project their consciousness to different locations through the multiple windows that are always open on their screens. 10 years on, this has become the new normal for everyone and is no longer a sign of youth and sophistication. It’s also a given that we store our memories on external devices and instinctively augment our thinking with Google. I’m not pointing out a flaw in the book–just underscoring a change in context that might make some of its observations–buoyant as they are with that sense of the cutting edge–seem obtuse to younger readers. Cronenberg’s ruminations on these subjects feel belabored because he’s spelling out what we now take for granted. I suspect that in another decade when we’re even further removed from Naomi’s and Nathan’s mediated existence–that is to say, when we’re in a later stage of simulation and abstraction–Cronenberg’s novel may take on the golden hue of nostalgia. But right now, it’s at the strange point of being at once too distant for identification and too close for wistful sentimentality. 

I wouldn’t change the novel’s focus on cyborgification because its reception–whether positive or negative–is entirely contingent on the passage of time. What I would get rid of is his absurdly heavy use of technological jargon. As photojournalists, Naomi and Nathan are audio-visual technophiles and geeking out over equipment brands and specifications is a huge part of who they are. While I understand that their proficiency with these technologies is central to their identities, the constant referencing of makes and models, the paragraphs packed with numbers and capital letters (Nikon Wireless Speedlight Commander SU-800, Sony RX100, Nagra ML and SD, etc.) is over the top and distracting. Do we really need to know the exact aperture, iso, and shutter speed settings? The specific iteration or generation of the device? I don’t think so. But, then again, it could be that tripping on these disruptive combinations is the point. Maybe Cronenberg is foregrounding the materiality of language and to remind us that it, too, is hardware, a piece of technology. He’s clever like that.

Cronenberg published Consumed ten years ago, and he hasn’t put out another novel since. That’s a shame. If this book shows us anything, it’s that he has loads of creativity and brilliance to spare. I hope that, eventually, he puts some of it into another writing project.