Suicide Club is quite the title. The juxtaposition of suicide and the innocent high-school banality of “club.” The invocation of Chuck Palahniuk, or the cult Japanese movie of the same name. The title is even more vivid against the cover, which places feminine script amid varicose vines, baby blossoms, and fussy fruits.
Thanks partly to the unforgettable title, I wanted to read the book as soon as I heard about it. I didn’t get around to it for months, but avoided spoilers like the plague. With no knowledge of the plot, I expected it would center on alienated adolescents forming secret death pacts, terrorizing the world with their refusal to fulfill the bright promise of their futures.
I was wrong. The characters are very old adults. In fact, they’re over 100 years old, and hoping to make it to immortality, preserved through advanced surgical treatments, impossibly low-stress lifestyles, and restrictive diets of Nutripaks, juices, and algae bars.
The book is a funhouse image of a real New York microcosm, and of a Soylent-swilling, Fitbit-metric-obsessed segment of modernity. Birth rates have slowed in this developed society. Inequality persists. Those with shorter lifespans reside in the unglamorous outer boroughs, while elite “lifers” reside in Manhattan’s glittering towers.
Lea, the protagonist, is one such lifer. She’s a high-level executive at a futuristic organ-harvesting management fund. She has a covetable apartment and an attractive, status-object boyfriend. Despite these privileges, she’s unhappy. Memories of her dead mother and brother haunt her. She often thinks of her father, who has been missing for years.
One day, Lea thinks she sees her father in the street. As she rushes to follow him, she’s nearly run over by a car. The state interprets the incident as a suicide attempt and uses it as a pretext to put Lea under surveillance. Her constant self-policing through diet, exercise, and beauty routines is no longer enough. Two apparatchiks begin monitoring Lea. She’s also forced to go to group counseling. Afraid of losing her status and her place in line for eternal life, Lea reluctantly complies.
At these therapy sessions, Lea meets Anja, the leader of a resistance group: the titular Suicide Club. Most members are not on the fringes of society, but squarely in the well-connected elite. The group records viral videos of ritual suicide. It also engages in lower-key subversion, like hosting dinner parties of grilled meat and other haram food.
Lea joins the Club. She intends at first only to spy on it, gathering information she can use to get back in the state’s good graces. Yet Lea is increasingly conflicted, torn between her ingrained ambition to live forever and her sense that there’s something rotten at the core of her world.
The premise is witty and compelling. The book uses the same mockery of health-craze persnicketiness and condescension that, in the real world, is often directed at Gwyneth Paltrow. By taking wellness fads to their logical extremes, Rachel Heng exposes them for what they often are: hollow, narcissistic, joyless, and controlling for control’s sake.
A customer at an unpretentious outer-borough diner, for instance, requests baby wild arugula, and is bitchily disappointed to be served the regular sort. The scene is darkly funny, a little comic relief in a book that is otherwise somber — and necessarily so, to convey the dissatisfactions of dystopia and the flattening effects of immortality.
Yet the deserved scorn sometimes undercuts the degree to which the state seems genuinely threatening. Instead, it comes across as fussy, mockable, and imminently resistible. Heng outlines an origin story for the regime, which gives weight and context to its potential demise, but there are a few underexplored questions, like who holds power and how the status quo helps them achieve their goals. There are references to legislation and to powerful, wealthy families who want to maintain their profits from the organ trade. The food in this world is manufactured from recycled bodies, a la Soylent Green, implying the presence of an organizing bureaucracy — whether this is done for thrift or the purported health benefits of cannibalism is unclear.
The haziness of the Suicide Club’s battle against the state compounds this. The regime appears to falter as the novel progresses. The apparatchiks complain about budget cuts, for instance, and the Suicide Club tells Anja that her shock tactics are shifting public opinion. Because Heng gives this information largely in asides or summary (we’re told rather than shown that “Eventually the club started involving Lea more,” for instance), it feels distant and muted.
A closer view of life outside the elite might have also made the dynamics of the society clearer. Two characters most closely affiliated with the non-lifers, Anja and Lea’s father, Kaito, are effectively members of the upper class who are slumming it. There are only two non-lifers seen up close. One is Lea’s brother Samuel, who, thanks to a genetic anomaly, lives a normal lifespan. Still, he grows up in a rarefied lifer milieu and exists on the page only in Lea’s memory. The other is Branko, a gruffly charming regular at the diner where Anja works; but he feels more like a rough sketch of a working-class hero than a fully realized character.
Part of this comes with the territory of fiction. Create a world that’s interesting enough and readers will crave even more world-building. Lea’s arc is compelling, especially since former believers often make for the sharpest critics of any faith. Yet Heng is ultimately more interested in how “wellness” affects Lea psychologically than in any other question — a valid authorial choice, but not an inconsequential one. The tendency of both protagonists toward interiority and reflection makes the plot less propulsive than it might otherwise be. Anja could have been used to deepen and complicate, rather than merely reinforce. Critiquing elite consumption only from within the elite feels like filling in a page from a coloring book only halfway.
If taken solely as a dystopian lampoon of health culture, Suicide Club thus feels a bit hollow. Hitler was a vegetarian, but this idiosyncrasy says little about either the horrors of his regime or the vegetarian lifestyle. The critique of the cult of wellness resonates with an audience of city-dwelling readers with Instagram accounts and self-image issues (it me). Not to dismiss the concerns of this readership, but the message is muddled when weighed against broader discouraging realities. Average lifespans are getting shorter, not longer; the U.S. meat industry expels 574 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually; the state adopts policies that actively harm public health (or is mocked for arguably misguided attempts to improve it). Nutritionists and environmentalists dream of a day when Americans will order more salad than they do steak, much less of a day when they’ll be able to distinguish between standard greens and their wild baby cousins.
Under this reading, Suicide Club equates the familiar capitalistic freedom of dietary choice — freedom to eat artificial sugar in cheap ice cream without guilt, freedom to consume meat liberally even if it increases your risk of colorectal cancer — with the joy and complexity of life itself. Thankfully, Heng complicates this reductive formula by hinting that there is also power and conviction in unhealthiness. Flashbacks to Lea’s transgressive behavior as a child, for example, show human chaos that resists the elaborate tidiness of the health-conscious lifestyle. These ambiguous moments keep the book from falling into the shallow, albeit entertaining, loop created by both ridiculing the wellness industry and presenting it as deadly serious.
The book simultaneously operates as an allegory for disordered eating. In one scene, Lea goes grocery shopping to prepare a nutritious “trad,” or traditional, meal of ratatouille and lentils for a romantic dinner with the trophy boyfriend. She contemplates buying a grapefruit, but decides against it, since it’s too high in sugar. Heng magnifies, expands, and normalizes such irrational food rules in the book not to promote one mode of consumption over another, but to highlight our obsession with consumption itself, and how we conflate it with perfection. Immortality is not the only marker of the sublime; lifers have low BMIs and Adonis-like physiques (Heng hysterically describes the trophy boyfriend as “defined in the deltoids” and “[light] around the hips”).
Clean eating and disordered eating are distinct, but they can overlap, as Heng pointed out in a 2018 Grazia Daily essay. In that same essay, Heng explained how Suicide Club was inspired by her experiences working at a prestigious finance firm in London, where she felt immense social pressure not merely to work hard at the office but also to maintain a certain lifestyle outside of it. Trim portions, healthy ingredients, and grueling triathlons were de rigueur.
In this reading, the vagueness of the state makes more sense. After all, the larger forces that shape our daily real-life choices are largely invisible to us and therefore vague. Still, thought experiments are most insightful when taken to extremes. In this case, that would mean fully externalizing and concretizing what is normally considered an internal, abstract process. Heng could only accomplish this by making the state feel as real and effective an enemy as the self.
While the interpretation of Suicide Club is up for debate, there’s no doubt that Heng’s prose is stylized, simultaneously lovely and macabre. A woman is “poured, a creamy, fragrant liquid” into “the sleek dark length” of her party dress. A pink plastic knife cuts the chocolate innards of a forbidden birthday cake decked with ivory buttercream and blood-red frosted flowers. It is a complex symbol: death and danger, vitality and desire, parental love and disgust. Thick braids rest “like docile snakes” on shoulders. A bouquet of “huge bulbous peonies in violent corals and heavy white roses [strain] to open, their thick petals peeling backward obscenely...slumping over in their crystal vases.” Beauty is as menacing as it is enticing, inseparable from decay.
The book concludes with a symbolic act of violence: one that resolves the respective private tragedies of the protagonists. No word on whether the non-lifers will revolt against their Nutripak-nibbling overlords. As for us readers, let’s all be a little more thankful for our “trad” food around the Thanksgiving table this year.
Rachel Heng was born and raised in Singapore. She is a fiction fellow at UT Austin's Michener Center for Writers. She has received grants and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the National Arts Council of Singapore. Suicide Club won the Gladstone Library Writer-in-Residence Award 2020. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.