Float Anxiety Abatement Center

The recovery center in which the novel begins, Float Anxiety Abatement Center, is designed to represent the ridiculous excess of wealthy lifestyles. As part of an effort to urge him to move past his sister’s protest suicide and his fixation on the pending climate crisis, Simon is sent to Float, where he is fed, housed, coddled, supplied with all kinds of expensive therapies, and cut off from the world’s political goings-on. Although the place appears calm and wholesome, it is in many senses a mirage, and indeed does nothing to prepare Simon for the reality of the world; it is a space which encourages insulated responses from people who can afford to remain insulated. The almost obtuse ignorance of the extreme crises afflicting the larger surroundings by the moderators and proctors at the recovery center functions as a kind of satire of the...