I hadn’t previously read any Nathan Tavares, but I’m always curious about books that provoke especially strong reactions, and a Redditor hyping up Welcome to Forever as the book of the year nudged me to look further into it. And between a premise that included plenty of weird memory stuff and an extremely messy interpersonal plot—both story elements I often love—and a strong couple chapters in the sample, there was plenty of cause to move this one up the TBR.
Welcome to Forever is mostly told from the perspective of Fox, an expert memory editor who is institutionalized after a bombing leaves his memory in tatters and his estranged husband dead. In the short term, his task is to piece together fragments of memory to recover some sense of who he is and who he wants to be moving forward. But if he can recover some of his former skills, he may also have the chance to unravel the code behind the memory attacks that came alongside the physical bombing.
Welcome to Forever goes all-in on the sci-fi premise, and anyone who gives it a read should be prepared for a chaotic jumble of perspectives, with the story bouncing madly through past and present and through reality and simulation. This may be the most ambitious book I’ve read all year, and I’m not even sure it’s close. But memories of Fox’s rocky marriage anchors the chaos to something grounded and explicable, and piecing together how things came apart and led to his current predicament is utterly compelling. There’s no straightforward villain, just a pair of flawed people connecting and clashing, presented in a disordered jumble that does justice to the story’s premise and keeps the reader on the edge of their seat.
Of course, the terrorism plotline means this isn’t ever going to be just a story about messy relationships and piecing together memory. And while there is certainly a tie between the interpersonal and memory plotlines and the broader, more epic story, I found the technothriller elements much weaker than the more personal elements. This won’t come as much surprise to regular readers of the blog, as I don’t often like technothrillers, but I didn’t feel that the high-stakes plot elements did justice to the chaotic messiness of the memory recovery elements. To be clear, the interpersonal messiness never completely goes away, and there are plenty of questions about the trustworthiness of various secondary characters to keep the reader guessing. But the back half of the novel falls into a “find a problem, solve the problem, find another problem” rhythm that gives the narrative more clear forward momentum than felt justified by the first half of the story.
That isn’t necessarily something I’m going to judge incredibly harshly, because it’s hard to maintain chaotic weirdness for 400 pages. Perhaps there could’ve been a satisfying novella that didn’t have an epic plot to bring order from chaos, but in a novel, there has to be something to keep the reader going for the long haul. It was always going to be difficult to balance a comprehensible A-plot with all the bizarre stitching of memory in the setup, so feeling a little bit letdown by the ending doesn’t come as a huge shock, and it doesn’t take away all the elements that appealed so much in the first half. For similar reasons, I’m not really taking off points for a controversial epilogue that some readers feel undercut the entire story to that point. The epilogue didn’t necessarily land for me, but it did keep me engaged, and I came into it with expectations tempered by the balance of thriller elements and interpersonal or psychological weirdness. So while it’s not the kind of ending that’s going to send Welcome to Forever to the top of my Book of the Year list, it’s also not an ending that’s going to keep me from recommending it to people I think might appreciate the same elements I did.
On the whole, I love Welcome to Forever for the ambition, for the narrative voice, for the interpersonal messiness, and for the chaotic bits of memory it stitches together into a story. I didn’t love the thriller elements of the back half or the way everything wrapped up in the end, but that doesn’t take away from a fascinating first half that made this one of my most interesting reads of the year, definitely well worth the time spent.
Recommended if you like: messy gay relationships, weird memory stuff.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Character with a Disability and is also Published in 2024, includes a Prologue or Epilogue, has Multiple POVs, and Features Dreams.
Overall rating: 16 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.