Brilliant details and minor characters and digressions engage the reader, but overwhelm the storyline. Memorable characters (a la Dickens, or Irving, or Pynchon) abound, but not a single one with warmth and humanity. Minor figures are given amazing, complete and totally bizarre pasts, but the main story with its numerous interrelated threads is never resolved.
Many of the details resounded for me in particular because the setting so carefully described is Boston -- a very recognizable Boston, even though most of the action is set about ten years in the future. Also, one of the major (unresolved) plot threads is the quest for an "entertainment" (a futuristic next stage beyond movies/videotapes) referred to as the "samizdat" (which happens to be the name of my company -- meaning "self-published").
This is a science-fiction novel with all the flavor and feel and nitty-gritty smell and taste of the present. It is presented in a series of seemingly jumbled strokes. Gradually the picture becomes clearer, the imaginary history between 1996 and the time of the story gets filled in; and we are gradually introduced to bizarre elements of technology and politics long after the terminology was first used.
Much of the story (and the innumerable digressions) revolves around drugs and alcoholism. And this is paralleled by story elements dealing with "entertainment" and its affect on the mind (and soul). It both cases, it's as if the mind has hidden switches and compartments and stimuli of particular kinds can produce massive, grotesque, and yet predictable results. (Like the mind is a machine, and there are important aspects of its operation that up until now have remained unknown.) This aspect of the plot is reminiscent of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and the rampant spread of the ridiculous "religion" of Bokonism.
The band of legless, terrorists who had deliberately lain in front of trains to lose their legs, is reminiscent of the self-mutiliation of the Alice Jamesians in Irving's Garp, who deliberately cut out their own tongues.
The fascination with technology, and the exuberant multiplication of subplots and digressions, is reminsicent of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Some of the most bizarre and amusing aspects of the invented history ring frighteningly true in terms of human nature, including the notion of "subsidized time" (the government selling the names of years to commercial sponsors) and the "concavity" (a large tract of land from Maine to upstate New York rendered uninhabitable as the dumping zone/reprocessing zone for the waste from the rest of the nation).
The extended metaphor of preparation for professional tennis (and the secondary comparisons to serious chess) leads to a series of provocative insights into human nature.
The mythic image of the mind-boggling dangers of perfect beauty is presented credibly as the other side of the coin of Medusa-ugliness.
The opening scene (where young Hal is interviewed for admission to a college which is very interested in him because of his exceptional tennis talents but is skeptical of his academic ability) is handled brilliantly, pulling us into the middle of the story very quickly. But the very puzzle that was raised by that scene is never resolved, in the nearly 1000 pages of narrative.
This reads like the work of someone with incredible talent, who simply didn't finish writing the story. He just left all the plot strings hanging -- instead of pulling them together and tying them up neatly as Irving and Pynchon and Dickens would do. The result for the dedicated reader is disappointment at a great work left unfinished.
-- Richard Seltzer
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, PO Box 320-161, West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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