The Palo Alto suicides started in 2002, when Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto High School class of 2007 and author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, must have been in middle school.
I, a year ahead in the class of 2006, was adjusting to the awkward realities of the freshman PE locker room when the news began to circulate that one of our classmates had, instead of coming to school that morning, stepped in front of the Caltrain line just a block away and ended his life.
Harris vows in the introduction to Palo Alto not to write yet another personal account giving an unsatisfying answer as to why one student after another in our leafy suburban hometown, even then a global epicenter of wealth and academic achievement, chose to die like Anna Karenina in what the CDC calls a “suicide cluster.” He prefers, in the spirit of his hero Karl Marx (no HUAC investigation is required to find evidence of Harris’s communist affiliations) to delineate the great impersonal forces that have shaped Palo Alto’s history.
Nevertheless, he can’t seem to avoid focusing on those gaps in our ranks, and he chooses to frame his seven-hundred-page history, which begins long before the town’s incorporation or indeed the existence of the state of California, by describing the town as haunted. Harris has produced what he imagines is the People’s History of Palo Alto, and the reader cannot escape the feeling that he wants to write it from the perspective of those whom the “Palo Alto System” burned out, especially the dead.
