The colonial travelogue was already a bloated genre by the time Jonathan Swift decided to poke fun at it in the 1720s. London publisher Richard Hakluyt began compiling folios of “true relations” penned by returning sailors as early as the 16th century. They had an episodic quality. Each chronicle was the latest installment in a serial that began in 1492 and extended indefinitely into the future. A full-bearded Englishman (or Dutchman, or Scotsman, or Frenchman) landed on shores where everything was unfamiliar. After trial and triumph, the hero returned home to tell the tale.
Except no hero could tell his tale alone. Any chronicle that wound up bound between fly-leaves was first selected by an editor and annotated by a small army of translators and censors. Part of the sport of reading a travelogue was to guess which fantastical claims were true, or at least true to the chronicler’s tale, and which were embellished by the folio’s editor.
Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels satirized this dynamic in 1726. In an introductory note, the narrator cursed his editors for their “infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating,” and accused “your printer” of mangling the text with falsehoods. “Do these miserable animals presume to think that I am so degenerated as to defend my veracity?” Gulliver asked his readers, before his story even began.
Escape!, the debut novel by two-time Survivor contestant Stephen Fishbach, poses Gulliver’s question for a new era. We live in the age of reality television. Adventure is ostensibly nonfictional again. If I were a contestant on a reality show, could I defend my veracity? Would I be so degenerated?
Escape! is a well-made novel. Fishbach attended an MFA program in the years after his Survivor appearances, and you can tell. The book is densely plotted. It’s full of declarative sentences written in the active voice with barely any adverbs. (“The entire jungle was a massive orifice, dumping on me.”) It’s a little dialogue-heavy for my taste, and much of the dialogue is bad, but come on: This is a book about reality TV. What kind of dialogue do you expect?
We open on Kent Duvall, a former contestant—and winner—of the prestigious reality show Endure, an obvious stand-in for Survivor. Kent is the kind of guy who “truly believes that on reality TV, in the crucible of man against nature, you could catch a glimpse of the universe’s hidden patterns and manifest your will upon the world.” He spends his evenings getting drunk in a room full of memorabilia, rewatching his past television appearances.
It takes Kent fewer than 50 pages to blow up his marriage and enlist in a new reality show. This is a low-budget knock-off of Endure, called Escape!, which proposes to maroon Kent on a beach with five other contestants. With each day that passes, producers add more prize money to a treasure chest located on another island. At any time, any one of the contestants could decide to build a raft and make a break for the money. But the longer they wait, the bigger the reward. Kent, hungry for a way to manifest his will, is hooked.
The novel also follows a producer named Beck. From behind the camera, Beck quickly develops an attachment to a contestant named Miriam, a meek woman who is cartoonishly unsuited to the rugged surroundings. We spend most chapters in Kent’s head, some in Beck’s, and a few in Miriam’s. Most of the action takes place during the show’s production. Like Survivor, the show is filmed on a tropical island.
Approaching the island by boat, Kent rehearses how he’ll narrate the moment for the cameras. The island “looks fungal, like an overgrown petri dish,” but he knows it must have been “produced” for maximum effect. Even in the wilderness, a reality television set is “groomed and manicured, like every snake or rat has been shampooed.” Kent decides that voyaging there is like “rocketing into a myth, like writing himself into the pages of Treasure Island.” It also reminds him of a Corona ad.
It’s as if, in the moment the camera transforms him into a hero, Kent witnesses the world’s transformation into a stage.
This kind of context collapse could have been the major theme of Escape! Instead, the novel exhausts itself chasing its neuroses in other directions. Like Kent, it lunges erratically between temporary obsessions—sex, celebrity, marriage, film editing, butterflies—that all prove unrewarding in the end. The result is a strangely illiterate novel that cannot live up to the promise of its subject matter.
Survivor, with which Fishbach is clearly obsessed, was designed to conjure the same mood as The Swiss Family Robinson. This was an 1812 novel that took the adventuresome elements of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and grafted them to a Lutheran morality tale. Its hero was not an individual sailor, but a shipwrecked family—and therefore it was perfect for kids. The Swiss Family Robinson inspired innumerable translations and adaptations, along with a live-action motion picture, produced in 1960 by the Disney Company. The film ferried the major elements of the 19th-century adventure novel into the silver screen era, establishing a visual vocabulary that would persist on television for generations, from Gilligan’s Island to Jumanji to Pirates of the Caribbean.
Survivor has always sat firmly in this tradition. Prospective contestants for the first season were asked to submit a tape responding to the question, “Which character would you be on Gilligan’s Island?” The showrunners “invoked grand comparisons to Odysseus and Robinson Crusoe, The Tempest and Lord of the Flies,” wrote Emily Nussbaum in her recent book Cue the Sun! An early version of the show was even called Expedition: Robinson.
Survivor meant to restore a bit of nonfiction, a bit of veracity, to the idea of adventure. The show resuscitated the foundational story-type of our literature, and dared us to believe that now, this time, the fantasy could be true. Reading Escape!, I get the sense that Fishbach, despite being a novelist, isn’t very curious about this literary genealogy at all. Maybe he’s distracted. Maybe he should turn off the TV.
There is one passage in Escape! that hints at the excellent novel it could have been, had Fishbach taken a more curious approach to his material. Early one morning, Kent awakens on his manicured island to find the ocean illuminated by an eerie green light:
He pushes himself off the shelter beams and walks toward the water, into the heart of the light, the throb of the green becoming so painful that he has to shield his eyes. He feels like he’s pushing into an awful mystery, and every part of his skin prickles with the sleep-sodden yearning that maybe the veil of the world has been pulled back…
It turns out to be the foglight of a squid boat. Fishermen move about on deck, as if to remind Kent that a wild, wriggling world exists beyond the edges of his internal television screen:
He stands for a few minutes on the sand, watching the men on deck in their bucket hats and wet T-shirts, marveling at their expertise as they gather in the net that bulges with writhing squid, every motion as practiced and purposeful as a dance, calling out to one another in a language he can’t understand but whose companionate banter is unmistakable, and it fills him with an envy so profound, compared to his own solitary aimless life, that he wishes the sea would swallow him right there.
The men on the squid boat are the first human beings Kent has seen for weeks whom he recognizes as people, not characters. They do what they do because they want it to be done. Not because a camera—or an editor—wants a record of them doing it.
For just a moment, before he wanders back to the shelter and distracts himself again, it seems Kent might be on the cusp of a discovery. He might be about to learn something. Something that can’t be seen on television.
But this is not the outcome Fishbach has in mind for poor Kent. Nor is it the direction he has in mind for his novel. Instead, Fishbach conscripts Kent, Miriam, and the whole gang in a strange final act full of inexplicable violence and unearned pathos.
With his manic climax, Fishbach probably aimed to capture something of the sweaty intensity of classics like Lord of the Flies or Robinson Crusoe. But he only wound up trading one made-for-TV template for another. The effect is of a conventional, even boring, reality show morphing suddenly into a prestige thriller.
If his goal was to write a novel that approximates the experience of toggling between Netflix recommendations, Fishbach has succeeded admirably. But I’m not sure anyone wants a novel like that. I’m not sure Fishbach does either. Why read—or write—a book if your only interest is TV?
