Lessons From Cycling Through Infinity

Multiverses capture the thrill of seeing a single life dilated into countless permutations. Picture Superman having to choose between versions of the Daily Planet building from six different universes. The windows, fixtures, and designs of the buildings vary, but they’re more similar than different. To which reality does Superman belong? All of them? None?

Superman’s nerve-racking choice, a typical comic-book scenario, epitomizes the woozy and weighty mood of multiversal fiction. After decades as a common premise in comics, the trope has in recent years taken root in movies, television, and literature. Stories with multiverses turn choice into trippy transit, spiriting characters through realities that differ from their own in slight but significant ways. These journeys through infinity often overwhelm the wee travelers’ psyche. “I want to know whether my decisions matter!” shouts a distraught character in Ted Chiang’s 2019 short story “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.” At its core, the multiverse is like an omniscient crystal ball that displays all fortunes rather than just one.

Such limitless vision proves fraught in Peng Shepherd’s ambitious new novel, All This & More. The book’s alternate realities abound with traps and secrets that trouble the main character’s quest for self-realization. Shepherd uses the multiverse to explore the ways identity can both form and fragment in a single moment. At the story’s center is a reality-TV show (which shares a name with the book) that offers participants the opportunity to make a series of different decisions from any point in their past and thus pursue a radically divergent life. The contestant enters a “quantum bubble” that can re-create reality wholesale, and gets to make a slew of life-altering choices over the course of the show’s episodes. Thorny ethical questions and hijinks ensue, and—because of the novel’s choose-your-own-adventure structure—the reader gets to participate in the decision-making, upping the stakes of every choice.

Although traditional novels that adopt this format are generally written in a second-person voice, allowing readers to take center stage, All This & More has a main character, Marsh, who nervously participates in the show. Marsh, short for “Marshmallow,” a childhood nickname given to her because she is “so sweet and soft,” is a 45-year-old divorced paralegal and single mom whose life bulges with regrets: dropping out of law school when she got pregnant, in part to support her then-husband, Dylan, as he pursued a Ph.D.; watching her best friend, who works at the same firm, become an in-demand lawyer; enduring the slow collapse of her marriage; having a failed rebound with her high-school boyfriend, Ren (in the middle of sex with whom she moans Dylan’s name). In other words, she’s something of a loser. “Even if Dylan hadn’t blown everything apart,” Marsh tells the show’s host, Talia, a former contestant, “I still was never going to have that life I wanted … Every year, I promised myself I would make a change, I would do something, and I never did.”

Her resignation and terrible luck make her an excellent candidate for a reset, which Shepherd stages as a surreal and twisty journey of self-improvement. The story takes reality television, a deceitful medium that’s easily gamified, and plays up the distortion and scheming. Marsh revisits her formative moments in the first few episodes, focusing on the choices that shaped her career, family, and love life. But she steadily grows more daring as the series goes on, becoming a swinger, a nature photographer, a telenovela actress, and more. The shape-shifting is dreamy but also desperate. “There are infinite paths inside the Bubble, and all she needs is one perfect life by the finale,” Shepherd writes. “How hard could that be, to find just one?”

Incredibly hard, Marsh learns. The shifts come with dramatic changes in fortune and setting, whisking her from Phoenix to Hong Kong to Mexico City, and she loses herself in the slipstream. Odd glitches follow her as well. Marsh’s real-life co-workers join her as she switches vocations, still wearing the clothes of previous jobs. Her memories, which are supposed to fuel the Bubble, warp into experiences she’s never actually had. At one point, she steps out of a trailer into a black void. The multiverse slowly morphs from a giddy lucid dream into a feverish waking nightmare.

[Read: A spidey sense we haven’t seen before]

Such instability is an inherent feature of multiverses, which, like the universe, teem with chaos despite appearing orderly. Shepherd’s steady, uniform writing style belies the story’s relentless motion. Rather than making explicit changes in perspective or voice, Shepherd lets the shifting locales and the novel’s array of forms dictate its tone, which leaps from romantic to frenetic to melodramatic. As the show progresses, we see viewers’ reactions, formatted in the book to mimic comments popping up in a TikTok-like livestream. The messages seem decorative at first but slowly become central to the plot. Marsh and Talia can see the comments as the show unfurls and often respond to the audience or make decisions at their behest, a dynamic that further plays up the story’s interactivity and angst. Shepherd, using different typefaces, also channels writing across other media, such as a character’s notebook, and at one point features an illustrated card game. This multiverse quietly rages.

Multiverses are often crucibles of the self in which dividing into infinite variations strengthens a character’s sense of wholeness. But for Shepherd, wholeness and division are squishy categories. From the jump, Marsh never shape-shifts alone. Every time she reimagines her life, she recognizes that her family and friends change as well, sometimes in ways that contradict or complicate what she envisions. No version of her can override her connections to other people, and the ones that try feel deeply alien to her, like they’re strangers in her skin. Choices have repercussions but also foundations, she learns. Every branch of Marsh’s decision tree extends from her formative relationships and experiences, even crappy ones. Cycling through infinity illustrates the depth of her roots.

But roots can also constrict or rot, possibilities Shepherd hints at in one of the book’s most memorable exchanges about the personal costs of Marsh’s choices. In the scene, Marsh is torn between returning to her life before the show and embracing its escapism, paths encouraged, respectively, by Dylan and Talia. After Dylan, speaking in the “voice he uses in his classroom lectures,” tells her that the latter “would be a lie,” Marsh thinks to herself about his argument:

The point of these stories is always that your original life is the best one, after all. That’s the warm and fuzzy moral they want you to take away, right? The hero or heroine goes out and tries on all these new lives, but always comes back in the end, because they realize it’s not about the success, or the stuff, or the circumstances. It’s about the self. That you are the thing that makes your life special.

This solipsistic plot is a fixture of multiversal fiction and many makeover plots, and Talia rejects it: “That is bullshit,” she says to Marsh and Dylan. For Talia, who truly believes that the one-in-infinity ideal Marsh has pursued is achievable, the essential, pure self simply doesn’t compare. Both Dylan’s and Talia’s positions are extreme, but the book’s roomy structure allows this tension between stasis and flux to cohabit.

What if the self is meant to be fragmented across timelines and realities? What if a better life always coexists in a constant state of friction with a worse one? What if Marsh is always a loser, even when she wins? The novel’s three endings, which the reader is left to choose between, offer various responses to these questions, but I think the most satisfying choice is to read them all. The secret thrill of choose-your-own-adventure books has always been that you can go down every path, skipping ahead, doubling back, and rereading as much as you like, multiple selves accumulating with each turn of the page.