Lost novels are often greeted with great fanfare. Truth be told, most of these lost novels should have stayed lost.
To a large extent, this is true of “For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs” (Scribner, 288 pages, $25), a previously unpublished work by fabled science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. “For Us” is purportedly Heinlein’s first novel, written — and then rejected by a number of publishers — in the late 1930s. Some argue that the work was rejected for its racy content, and one can see how Heinlein’s paean to free love would have disturbed the sensibilities of Depression-era America. But it is also equally plausible that the book simply was not up to snuff.
As a novel, “For Us” reads like a cross between a movie script and a rather dry series of lectures on how to create a utopian society, over which Heinlein attempted to drape a slender plot. Most of what we learn, see and experience comes to us by way of dialogue, though Heinlein did provide a two-page footnote evidently intended as a means of character development. Then there is the matter of the appendix, which is dreadfully dull.
All this having been said, there is, no doubt, value in publication of “For Us.” Poorly realized as it is, “For Us” presages many of the themes Heinlein went on to explore much more successfully in later works. Within these covers one encounters time travel, space travel and technological advances that effectively end physical death. Heinlein also examines new marriage forms and alternate social orders.
The plot of the novel, such as it is, revolves around Perry Nelson, who crashes his car in 1939 and wakes up to find himself in 2086. A lovely, highly intelligent and sexually liberated woman rescues him and proceeds to give him a crash course in U.S. and world history to fill him in on what he missed in the more than 100 years since his “death.” It is here that some intriguing nuggets emerge. Among other things, Nelson learns that a United Europe had been born, a somewhat ludicrous notion at the time the manuscript was written but which neatly foreshadows the birth of the European Union. Nelson also learns that, in 2003, two helicopters destroyed Manhattan in an act of war, eerily similar to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Heinlein fanatics, and there are many, will no doubt find many of the criticisms here overwrought. But Heinlein first-timers would do better to dip their reading toes into “Stranger in a Strange Land” or “Starship Troopers.” Only after immersion in Heinlein’s superior works can “For Us, the Living” be appreciated for what it is — a rather bad novel, but an essential one for those interested in exploring the birth of the Heinlein oeuvre.