Is the thrill gone? Mystery, at least of a certain ilk, seems to be. No longer, except perhaps in historical novels set during the shadowy age before Watson and Crick, can a fictional character unwittingly embark upon a 400 plus page quest at the end of which, awash in a morally uplifting climax, he or she will discover the true identity of his or her real parents. No longer may the cheeky, gender-bending, Francophilic farce be ignited by a mistaken identity. Forever onward such long-winded guignols of misidentification will, by law, be shrunk to dwindling-attention-span size thanks to a little timely DNA testing administered by a rational, morally-neutral industry whose billboards, emblazoned with images of tearful teen mothers, inquire: "It's the 21st century: Do you know who the father is yet?" But the thrill. Is it really gone?
           In the Polonian future our responsibilities, as defined by our values, will become at once so much greater and so much more banal. If one should choose to reproduce, one should take more care than did our hirsute, lowslung ancestors, picking and choosing their mates based on such soggy notions as emotion, obligation, or remuneration. How passé. Sex is for fun. Reproduction is business. Whether or not it is now possible, we seem to want science to give us the option of choosing our offspring, of birthing without the guesswork: Olympians, supermodels, geniuses, interior designers, all 100% tendency-toward-addiction, physical-and-mental-abnormality, and life-threatening-hereditary-disease free, guaranteed or our lightly chilled zygotes back.
           The thrill, then–at least for that pleasure-loving sector of society already accustomed to breeding for the purpose of preserving stasis, and those posturing mods who confuse the round of couture seasons with the kind of singular adaptational moments that produce carnivorous flowers, opposable thumbs, and a being who can conceive his own God and then declare Him dead (for you, my friends, operators have always been standing by)–the thrill evolves into simply another consumer rush, the biological analog of choosing new wallpaper or orbiting the earth with Russians. What thrill greater than raising your very own hand-picked Übermensch? It is, indeed, the final thrill, that enjoyed by the sexless heavenly host: the actualization of evolutionary heat death. Reproductive war is over, if you want it. Let's get stuffed.
           And if the thrill really is in the ends and not the means, why waste time with your own, scraggly family tree? Why not raise someone dependable, someone who's already been test-driven, someone you truly admire? Where in vitro fertilization once filled the bill, the step to cloning isn't so big, is it? As Elizabeth Mann, the cynical, intelligent, libertinous narrator of Jenny Davidson's double helical debut novel, Heredity, says: "'The real test isn't whether you're pro or con....It's who you'd choose to clone, given the chance.'" Elizabeth has that chance and she chooses a two hundred year old criminal, the ultimate bad boyfriend, definitely not the kind you take to father.
           And in an important sense, Heredity is more about fathers than infertile mothers, about using the womb to counter the sinister patriarchy of medical professionals that, in the argument of the novel, too often, too easily oversteps its bounds. "It's all regulated these days," claims Gideon Streetcar, Elizabeth's unctuous, self-possessed fertility specialist lover and erstwhile accomplice in her science project. "I don't mean to abandon the ethical question, but surely it's moot: every decision is hedged about with restrictions....It's not a problem for philosophers. It's a problem for doctors, and I can assure you that we always bear the Hippocratic oath in mind." Elizabeth disparages such specious equivocations and, dutiful researcher she, provides plenty of arguments to the contrary. In the Hogarthian London of Jonathan Wild (the aforementioned criminal clone-to-be whose story, intertwined with the main narrative, is communicated via an improbably found manuscript written by his third and final wife, Mary), doctors and their henchman violate death by pilfering corpses for the educational purpose of dissection and the ornamental purpose of embalming. And in Elizabeth's twenty-first century world, her father, himself a celebrated fertility phenom, is capable of the most appalling violations, while Gideon and his mates, twice-removed surrogate fathers, exert their technological power over life, hoping eventually to sell fertility over the internet and to offer cloning as a real and supremely narcissistic alternative to IVF, all with the stated purpose of helping every woman to her "right to have a child of her own....The right to pass on her genetic material to her offspring, to perpetuate the family line in her descendants," a blatant interpolation of the desire for an heir so often issued from the mouths of male regents.
           Heredity’s present and past are governed by a cruel and deterministic cycle of abuse against which powerful and crafty Jonathan Wild's desperate assertion of his right, even in death, to self-determination does him little good. "We have a kind of property in our own bodies," he declares, holding Mary at knifepoint during their first meeting, thinking her a spy sent by the doctors to alert them when his corpse becomes available. "Every man should have the right, after he dies, to know that his carcass will molder decently in the grave. It is an abomination to cut men up in public and display them to view like so many curiosities." Both his analog and his nemesis, centuries more sophisticated and self-aware in her rebellion, Elizabeth finds herself strangely moved as she studies Wild's mounted skeleton in a museum of medical curiosities; Elizabeth asserting that same right to self-determination through acts of self-mutilation and her symbolically perverse affair with a weak double of her father; Elizabeth nevertheless fulfilling Wild's fears of ill use; Elizabeth drawn back into the ineluctable cycle: "I find Jonathan Wild sexy."
           There are moments in this saucy, thought-provoking coil of love and sex and death when Heredity seems to live for its S&MTV sexuality, when, while playing coy with the structural irregularities of its own frame, it unselfconsciously winks at the voyeur reader, indulging in an indelicate come on ("Sucking down an oyster is pretty much like swallowing a big expensive mouthful of cum.") or smiles, gives an extra little pudendal peek, and whispers in the parlance of a pilfered stroke book, "I sigh as his fingers slide into my wet warm pussy." Yet when Elizabeth, mysteriously unable to get pregnant, stretches out for an examination beneath Gideon's latex, speculum, and soft caress in scenes overflowing with potential due to their resonance with Elizabeth's history, when the banal process of the rut, of the fetishistic still-life could transcend lurid detail for the metaphysical, for ontological horror, the narration turns disappointingly away. There is a betrayal here of the wit and candor of our narrator, of the capacity for despair expressed in the opening formulation: "I can kill myself. I can kill my father. Or I can simply disappear and move someplace nobody will even think of looking." There is a reluctance on the part of the reader to accept this despair as post-teenage, post-modern posturing. Yet Elizabeth, who, we've come to trust, has a craving for extreme action, is periodically restrained, silenced in the name of maintaining, for the reader (that ingrate!), the mystery of the pater profundus, Dr. Mann, who, even when his secrets are revealed, never fully emerges from the shadows, is never satisfactorily scourged.
            Heredity's plot, perhaps with the purpose of demonstrating structurally the inescapability of fate and ultimately heredity, depends too heavily on fortuitous encounters and elaborately contrived fiats, while the restrictive first person, present-tense point-of-view tends to confine the main narrative to a reactive stance, robbing it of the reflective space necessary fully to develop its argument beyond provocative questions, declarations, and aphorisms, beyond the intriguing "what if" proposition of the cloning project. The juxtaposition of the Wild narrative, while more successful (if less heady) taken on its own, doesn't make up for these flaws. At its heart, Heredity is a novel of ideas, a cool, informed, and intelligent interrogation of DNA technology, medical ethics, sex without issue, issue without sex, and the implications of these for our biological future. But its determination to fulfill the outdated expectations of a sexy, science mystery only counteract its significant strengths, undermining, in the end, the timely concerns of its foundation with unfortunate red herrings, a revelation that should have come sooner, and a dissipated, unsatisfying climax.