The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 January 2023
by Thomas Mallon
These days, we call it FOMO, a nearly clinical psychological state, the Fear of Missing Out. The recent COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a slightly delayed pandemic of FOMO, as people learned to accept risk of infection and tried to restore a "normal" state of living. (The end result is debatable.) It's the feeling of seeing your friends at New Year's Eve in Times Square while you're at home watching it on TV. The big game everyone watched but your TV was on the blink. The show everyone else had tickets to see. The dramatic once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse on a cloudy day. That sense of missing something you know might be significant can be very powerful. It can drive you to some desperate actions. You might even feel compelled to march on the US Captiol building and end up storming Congress when you weren't quite sure that's exactly what you want to do. Significant events are communal experiences. The 1960s seemed to be crowded with significant events, and among those were the many firsts in the early days of human space flight. One man flying around the Earth three times was cause for huge New York ticker-tape parades. (When was the last time we had a parade for an astronaut?)
So, this reader can certainly relate to the excitement of an eleven-year-old boy in 1962, entranced by the first crewed space flights, nerdy about their flight details, imagining what it would be like to fly in space. It is May of 1962, and the day of Scott Carpenter's orbital flight in the tiny tin can Mercury space capsule called Aurora-7. This entire novel is fascinatingly constructed around the events of that five-hour flight. Young Gregory is engrossed in the mission, driven to distraction by the sense that a disaster might occur. He learns that crowds of people are gathered at Grand Central Station, and he fears missing out. He sets out on his own personal adventure from suburban New York, in the hopes of catching a major event in real-time. His father, Jim, works in Manhattan, not far from the great train station. His mother feels alone and adrift at home. Scott Carpenter is a man on a mission, and he discovers the joys and beauty of space flight. Indeed, his celestial trip captures the imagination of millions, and there is a not too subtle note that he represents a Jesus-like (also a carpenter) figure, carrying heavenly aspirations into space and returning to the Earth.
Along with their stories, Thomas Mallon brilliantly drapes real events from May 1962; everything from the first surgical reattachment of a human limb to John Kennedy's presidential duties. Other characters, too, experience their own routine days punctuated by significant moments. There is a powerful atmosphere of simultaneity and the subsequent passage of time (this novel was published in 1992, thirty years after Aurora-7's flight). Gregory takes a chance, driven almost by outside forces. Does it change his life? Does it make him who he becomes? Mallon is too canny an observer to make the outcome that obvious, and that's part of the beauty of this book, joining celestial communal sentiment with the rote everyday lives we end up living, even if there remains more than a hint of a greater plan at work. Recommended.
(The flight of Aurora-7 was not an unqualified success. A couple of Carpenter's experiments did not quite work, and due to a confluence of delays and distractions, a retrofire that occurred not quite on time resulted in the capsule landing 200 miles downrange of its original destination, resulting in a nerve-wracking hour of searching for this tiny capsule bobbing on the waves somewhere north of Puerto Rico.)