There’s little that reality TV audiences love more than a proper transformation. There’s the discovery of little-known talent (American Idol, America’s Got Talent), plucking ordinary folks out of obscurity and building them into stars. There’s an entire matrimonial relationship arc (The Bachelor, Love is Blind) constructed in less time than it takes to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture. There’s plastic surgery gone horribly wrong (The Swan, Botched), turning deluded hopefuls into nightmare versions of themselves. In that context, the premise of Peng Shepherd’s (The Cartographers) third novel seems completely plausible: The latest reality show to take the nation by storm is All This and More, in which an ordinary, unfulfilled, regretful person gets to use quantum mechanics to try out every possible iteration of themself before settling on a newer, better, brighter, more perfect persona.
Season 1’s darling was Talia Cruz, earnest Everywoman-turned-talk-show-personality. Her televised journey was very Charlie in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, borne aloft to the sky on bubbles without giving thought to what happens when they pop. It’s giving a teary-eyed Kelly Clarkson belting “A Moment Like This” in the American Idol finale while we happy-sob with her. The same goes for Marsh, the star of season 3, who has indeed waited a lifetime for a moment like this. Or rather, several moments: parallel-universe “Bubbles” in which she goes to law school as planned (before that life was derailed by motherhood), in which she reconciles with her cheating husband, in which she rekindles things with her high school sweetheart. Having never shaken her unfortunate nickname, Marshmallow wants to throw herself into the metaphorical flames rather than fear getting a bit toasty.
The fact that our heroine is a fortysomething divorced mom too timid to correct people as to her real name (which, interestingly, we never actually learn) should tell you enough about how bleak her prospects are. But wait, what happened to All This and More season 2? That’s the big mystery stalking Marsh from Bubble to Bubble, as she experiments with the aforementioned retcons to her life—guided, Quantum Leap-style, by Talia Cruz herself, having leveled up into the ultimate omnipotent role of reality TV producer.
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All This and More
And when Marsh’s potential life paths aren’t perfect enough, Talia whips out the Show Bible (a wonderfully cheeky detail) and sends Marsh leaping into scenarios she’d never even pondered. Shepherd makes the experience even more meta by inviting you, the reader, to do what reality TV viewers can’t: The book is structured as an homage to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, in which you choose Marsh’s next Bubble in exponentially branching paths. Yet these attempts to satiate her need for out-of-this-world thrills and once-in-a-lifetime experiences—being a nature photographer racing an erupting volcano, a telenovela star beloved the world around, and even a high-stakes poker champion—just makes Marsh want ever more more more. A livestreamed audience chat scrolling in her field of vision plays into the parasocial issues of viewers getting too emotionally invested in reality TV stars, though in this case it’s mostly anonymous users cheering on even the most outlandish plot twists. Not to mention, one unexpected ally once things start to get really weird.
In every scenario are the same players: Marsh’s ex Dylan and their daughter Harper, new love interest (and high school sweetheart) Ren, best friend and coworker Jo. But as the Bubble generates increasingly bonkers lives for Marsh, these familiar faces begin to get warped, spouting lines that don’t fit the scene, molding them into virtual strangers—raising questions about the ramifications of the Bubble not just on her life, but on the lives of people who weren’t able to sign the RealTV waiver.
It’s an ambitious premise, not least because Shepherd is balancing a Venn diagram of readership: reality TV aficionados, speculative fiction fans, and the (presumably sizable) overlap between the two. It’s very inventive thinking and demonstrates the canny understanding that, yes, if the U.S. mastered quantum mechanics the first use would be simultaneously creating alternate realities operating on the ludicrous rules of reality TV and turning a profit via viewership numbers from the millions who want to live vicariously through this poor schmuck’s bad choices.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Marsh’s season, the book itself telegraphs the big “twists” too much. It quickly becomes obvious which love interest Marsh should be pursuing, even as there is a lot of fun in intentionally steering her toward the other. It helps that this isn’t just a matter of handing out roses on The Multiverse Bachelorette; her law career ambitions, unfulfilled wanderlust, and hopes for daughter Harper’s musical talent are all bound up with both men, deeply complicating her choices. No matter which part of her life she amps up, something else must always be sacrificed.
By contrast, the conspiracy behind the Bubble, and the Chrysalis effect that keeps following Marsh through every iteration of her life, is too muddled to really raise the stakes. It’s possible that this is due to the specific order in which I read the book, but I think that’s also an issue bound up in the premise no matter which way you read: In order to show a glitch in the machine, it must pop up so often that there can’t be much subtlety. Again, so much repetition makes it somewhat easy for the reader to anticipate the big reveal, though it does tie in nicely to this larger commentary on selfish human nature and the callousness with which we flatten reality TV characters into sources of amusement, forgetting that they are real people.
As far as I can tell, Shepherd saves the promised multiple endings for the very end of the book, rather than a typical CYOA where the story may come to a sudden (and often grisly and/or creepy) halt a third through, or halfway, or three-quarters. Instead, in keeping with the TV show’s season-finale requirement, Marsh must choose a permanent life path. But really you’re the one who gets to turn that page (or click that hyperlink, in the ebook), as Marsh’s final decision regarding her continued involvement with All This and More ripples out into three distinct scenarios. Each is gratifyingly disturbing, proving that the experience has gotten under her skin, that she’s developed new tics and new awareness of being watched and of manipulating reality. In fact, that’s a pretty apt description for anyone who’s been through the reality TV grinder. So in that way, it succeeds. But as a book that might have interrogated quantum mechanics as deeply as its physicist characters do, All This and More falls short of exploring the subject as meticulously as it could have.
Kudos to Shepherd for eschewing the easy answer in any of the outcomes. There is no neat ending to All This and More; the reader has the feeling of having tuned in and then eventually tuned out of Marsh’s life. I only wish that the journey itself had shared the same high stakes as its destination(s).
All This and More is published by William Morrow.
