The Measure

Nikki Erlick

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times, November 5th 2022

In American writer/editor Nikki Erlick’s debut novel The Measure, every adult in the world awakes one morning to find a box on their doorstep containing a string corresponding to the length of their life. Unlike The Collections, where the agents of destiny are identifiable and potentially avoidable, the source of the boxes is a mystery – God and aliens are the most popular candidates – it is only the time, not the manner of death, that is revealed, so it is impossible to take action to prevent it. Some choose to open their boxes, while others remain deliberately ignorant. Either way, the individual and societal effects are immediate and profound.

 ‘Short-stringers’ are soon relegated to second-class citizenship (why would you give somebody who will die within years a promotion, a mortgage, insurance, elect them to public office, start a relationship or a family with them) – and painted by opportunistic politicians as desperate and potentially dangerous. Long stringers, meanwhile, must choose whether to stand with their doomed loved ones or walk away with the guilt of their own good fortune.

The novel is told from the perspective of multiple characters, both short- and long-stringed, as they find ways to re-evaluate and re-value life in this new reality. Some know one another, some do not, but even the most disparate intersect at some point during the story, connections all the more satisfying for being known by the reader but not the individuals themselves. Erlick uses them to explore a diversity of responses to her hypothetical scenario, but I found the broader philosophical issues most interesting. The way that a long stringer’s good fortune can result from an event that shortens the string of another, for example, or how knowledge of imminent death might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Would you open the box, and if so, would it influence how you live your life? Make it more meaningful or less? These are questions I hope I never need to confront.