Robert Silverberg is, on occasion, a deceptive writer. He exhibits a style and approach which seem almost basic. Clear, almost bare-bones sentences, conveying their cargo of information efficiently in service to plots that move along at a steady pace, gradually building to a point that, once made, is obvious. You set the book (or short story or, his preferred form, novella) aside with a satisfied sense of having enjoyed a work of unpretentious refinement, but not entirely sure why.

Later the full impact hits you, like a waterfall in a low-g environment. You find yourself awash in the world he showed you. Walking down the street in the aftermath can seem disorienting because—

Well, that’s what good science fiction does, causes your perspective to shift. Silverberg’s work provides that shift very reliably, but instead of a slambang grandiloquent epiphany he does it gradually, slowly, almost geologically over the course of a story that in many respects is quite ordinary.

Take Dying Inside. What is it, after all, but a novel about a life of failed promise? We have read many of these in literature, stories about gifted, talented people who simply never quite make it. Philip Roth comes to mind with his expositions and exegeses on mediocrities who realize that they are. In fact, Roth could very well have written this novel had he the capacity to step outside the bounds of the expected the way SF requires.

The difference is the substance of the problem. Where on the one hand we have stories of people who through private demons and personal flaws cannot rise to their own occasions, here we have a very real manifestation of a vanishing ability gradually marking the limits of what a man can achieve through his personal “gift.”

Unlike any of the mediocrities in mainstream literature, some of whom become distracted, others of whom misunderstand the nature of their talents or fail to recognize the limits of their abilities, still others who simply misunderstand the world around them, David Selig does not have that excuse. He can see, directly, what the world around him is like, what it’s doing, what it thinks of itself and of him, and what it intends to do about itself. David Selig is a telepath.  He can, literally, read minds. While other characters in this mold try to “read” the street, Selig neither has to try nor interpret.  He can climb inside the minds of those around him and know. There is no reason he should not be a billionaire or the master of a great state or a fine artist.

But he is not and this is where Silverberg’s particular skill tells. Selig is getting by writing papers for desperate college students. He has had a number of rather ignominious jobs, once as a minor editor in a publishing house where he meets, falls in love with, and loses the one great love of his life because he himself cannot deal honestly with his own ability.  He scrapes by. He has an advantage any of us might envy and yet…

Instead of taking advantage to really establish himself in life, he lives on the fringes, in the shadows. He inhabits an apartment in a multifamily building in a decaying neighborhood and lives a cash-and-carry existence. He skims on the surface, avoiding his older sister who keeps trying to jumpstart some kind of latelife relationship with the little brother she hates (because she knows what he can do) and avoiding—

Well, avoiding anything that reminds him of the salient feature of his present existence, which is that he is slowly losing his ability.

Like a form of Alzheimer’s, his telepathy is fading. He has good days and bad days, reception is often muddled, it is becoming an uncertain talent, and he has no idea why. It could be age, it could be nutrition, it could be a real disease. At times he affects an attitude of not caring, of actually wishing it would vanish. Life might be easier not knowing what the people he has to deal with are thinking, feeling, being. But there is an undercurrent of desperation throughout, something he keeps at a distance because it would be devastating to deal with face on.

Which, of course, is the way he treats life in general.

The deceptiveness of the novel is in its top to bottom symmetries.  Selig lives on the fringes because he doesn’t want to get involved.  He doesn’t want to get involved because when he does he gets far more involved than is humanly sustainable. He survives by manipulating people with his gift, but he doesn’t manipulate them to any real advantage because he doesn’t want to get involved. Nor does he want to be the monster he suspects he may be.  He tries to be outside, above it all, because he is terrified that he is not. He can’t be truly detached because he needs other people to survive, but he won’t embrace them, either, because he doesn’t want them to know what he is. The layers go down and down, onion-like, and in the end there may be no center, and he doesn’t want to find that out, either, so it’s possible his vanishing ability is self-sabotage.

He holds humanity in contempt because, finally, he holds himself in contempt. Wanting them to accept him he won’t allow it because what would that say about him that such pathetic creatures might think well of him?

As you read, go through his life in finely-wrought flashbacks, watch his “progress” and endure his growing failure, the novel moves through you, easily.  This is a quiet tragedy, yet so strange because we can see any number of places where Selig might have changed something, anything, so he would be in a better place, and in that it is the equal of any well-conceived character drama, but then there’s this added detail that makes it all so much stranger, so much greater, so much deeper once we let it work through us.

It is as if Silverberg is showing us that of all the advantages telepathy might give us, the most likely one would be the ability to be even lonelier than we are. Access to such intimacy would not open us to richer human interactions. Quite the contrary, it would cause us to shun intimacy. Because, possibly, the real pleasure of intimacy is in the surprise, the unexpected, the mutuality of discovery.  Telepathy would be like skipping to the end of the book.

We would still be left with the task of reading—and understanding—the rest of the book.

There have been many attempts in science fiction to portray telepathy.  This is one of the more successful.  In so doing, it reveals much about human nature that, as we read, we come to realize is better discovered through our common means and abilities.

As Selig’s talent continues to fade and he is forced to deal with people more and more without the intercession of preknowledge, we see a human being trying to do what we all try to—reach out, understand, touch another soul.  Telepathic or not, it seems we are all stuck with one thing—who we really are.