I remember the feedback I gave Nikki Erlick several years ago when she asked my opinion of the first few pages of her as-yet-untitled manuscript. The writing style from Erlick — an occasional reviewer here at BookTrib — was first-rate. The story, as much as I had, was intriguing and flowed wonderfully. My only concern was that The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin, a highly anticipated book with a similar theme of people knowing in advance when they were going to die, was about to be released. Might that spoil the party?
I was fascinated with Benjamin’s concept. I read The Immortalists the day it launched. It was terrific.
Yet Erlick’s The Measure, out today June 28 from William Morrow, is better.
FATE AND CHOICE COLLIDE
On a routine spring morning, as people around the world open their front doors, they find small wooden boxes with their names and the words, “The measure of your life lies within.” Inside each box is a string. It is later learned that a long string indicates the box owner will live a long life, a short string means the opposite.
Once the implications of the boxes and their string lengths are realized, obvious questions arise: Where did the boxes come from? Who is playing God and confirming that string lengths do in fact reflect life lengths? And, given the choice to open the boxes and learn one’s fate or not, what does each character do?
What a delicious assortment of possibilities and intricacies, and Erlick covers plenty of them, from personal relationships to political advantages to issues of prejudice (let’s stop hiring short-stringers) to social causes and protests to the basic temptation of should I look or shouldn’t I?
To not look maintains the status quo to some degree — people go on living their lives as before, yet they live with the constant reminder that they can look at any time. To know is to either breathe a sigh of relief or rethink how one wants to live his or her remaining days. As researchers and scientists study the strings, they confirm their validity and are able to predict how much time each person has left.
But the arrival of the boxes, as Erlick writes, “sent so many people astray, a gust that blew them off course.”
TOLD FROM MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW
Erlick creates a cast of characters so genuine you forget the crazy situation she has placed them in: a gay couple with different string lengths; a presidential candidate who uses string length to advance his campaign; two Army roommates who switch strings to better serve their needs; a participant in a short-strings support group who exchanges letters with an anonymous school teacher.
While most of Erlick’s characters maintain a controlled, intelligent, reflective posture, she introduces others who quit their jobs, shut their stores, leave schools, move away, incite riots and even try to solve their grief with mass shootings. It’s a society gone mad.
Has Erlick created a universal Garden of Eden in which basic human characteristics are put to the test — most notably temptation? But temptation only at the expense of the temptee!
A CAPTIVATING DEBUT
In The Measure, Nikki Erlick has authored a work that far surpasses what could traditionally be expected of a debut author. She has given us a thought-provoking, deeply touching, creative narrative that opens a host of intriguing possibilities, storylines, themes and messages.
So what message is the author sending? Perhaps that our beginnings and endings have already been determined by a higher authority — and knowledge, in this case, can’t change the course that has been outlined but it can influence behavior.
Or how about: don’t judge love by its length of time. She uses a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “It is not the length of life but the depth of life.” And then one of her characters adds, “You don’t need a long lifetime to make an impact on this world. You just need the will to do so.”
People, as The Measure points out, often have the need to mark their existence for posterity and in less-than-glamorous places: subway walls, tree barks, schoolroom desks — with the words “I was here.”
“To let it be known that these people lived. A testament to the fact that these humans — with their long strings, medium strings and short strings — they were here.”
Nikki Erlick is here — and don’t be surprised if this book springboards her to great heights in the literary world.
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About Nikki Erlick:
The Measure is Nikki Erlick’s debut novel. Her work has appeared online with New York Magazine, Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, The Huffington Post, Indagare Travel, BookTrib and Vox Media. As a travel writer, she has explored nearly a dozen countries on assignment — from rural villages in France to the arctic fjords of Norway. As a ghostwriter, she has written for CEOs, entrepreneurs and academics. She graduated Harvard University summa cum laude and was an editor of The Harvard Crimson. She earned her master’s degree in Global Thought from Columbia University.
