The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 22 March 2021
by Kathleen Alcott
What is there left to say about the radicalism of the 1960s, the magnificent and troubled US space program, life amongst the gay community in the early years of the AIDS epidemic? How much of all those can you squeeze into one novel? How much is left to be said after the hundreds of books reflecting back, some might say self-indulgently, upon those transformative decades? Then again, any history, or especially memoir, has a tinge of self-indulgence. It's become one of the hallmarks of American letters, and has been for generations. We reflect upon ourselves because of the uniqueness we endow ourselves with. But we're just human, after all, aren't we? In order to capture an essence of three decades of time in this vast historical space, a writer has to focus our attention, and has to write with an astute metaphorical style, such as that Kathleen Alcott deploys in this sprawling novel of the era.
The book opens at the end of the 1950s, in the early days of America's space race with the Soviet Union, and just before the first Sputnik becomes the first human-made object to orbit the Earth. Fay Fern is a young woman living and working with her sister Charlie at a roadside inn and restaurant not far from Edwards Air Force Base, where the first astronauts have been recruited out of a corps of test pilots. There, she meets and falls into an affair with Vincent Kahn, a taciturn pilot who will go on to be the first man to walk on the moon (wait, who is that again?). Fay and her sister are estranged daughters of well-heeled California suburbanites. They've rebelled against their privileged upbringing in what will become a touchstone decade for that kind of rebellion. After Fay and Vincent go their separate ways, Fay escapes to Central America and then returns to join Shelter, a militant domestic terrorist group (think of the Weather Underground (and we don't mean the weather predicting web pages)). By now, she has a son, Wright. He and his mom are very close, but, like many children of the counterculture, he seeks a kind of stability and normalcy that is anathema to the revolutionaries. Vincent Kahn lands on the moon. A tragic error leaves innocents dead. Years on the run ensue, only to culminate in another quixotic tragedy. Young Wright grows up to be a young gay man in San Francisco in the early 1980s. It is there that he finally attempts to confront his origins, to seek out his father. By then, Kahn is a lost solitary soul, whose one dramatic moment is enshrined in history, but upon which he doesn't seem to be able to build a life. Indeed, that same isolation is apparent in both Fay and Wright. That isolated disconnect is one of the core themes of this book. America's unrelenting individualism, its blindness toward collective progress and suffering, have long distorted its nominally idealistic goals.
These are broken people, as fractured by their own internal conflicts as by the external forces working upon them. They live in a parallel universe version of America, where, for the reader, very familiar historical events have been altered just enough in the service of the author's search for America. But her shifting viewpoints leave us as yet unconnected to the motivations of her primary characters. Just when he is returning from the moon, we see Kahn's accomplishment through the eyes of protestors who resent the use of tax money upon such frivolous projects. Just as Fay becomes most deeply involved in the protest movement, we see her actions through her disillusioned son. And just as he finally comes to terms with his origins, we see Wright's final act through the eyes of the close-knit community he leaves behind in San Francisco. While Alcott's oblique writing is a challenge to understanding the motivations of some of her characters at some points of the story, it is otherwise quite often beautifully impressionistic, evoking place and emotion in a rich language that can stir her readers. It is the greatest strength of this novel.
One may find it is a bit tricky to take a major world event essentially unchanged and assign new characters to all of its key roles. Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. How can you change his identity in fiction without the reader having to pause and think "what happened here?" The exercise runs the risk of keeping the story at a distance from the reader who is now constantly aware of occupying a parallel reality. It is something different somehow from a speculative fiction, or a historical novel. Or maybe the moon landings are still just too close. In any case, it was hard for this reader to entirely forget the change, despite the skillful storytelling elsewhere in the book. Who did or did not land on the moon, after all, is not the main story here.
(Full disclosure: your faithful reader here is employed among a team of NASA funded space engineers. From within, as Alcott discovered, the story of NASA's mission is more layered than one might otherwise discern. In the decades since the first crewed moon landing, this layering has been revealed in retrospective books, movies and TV series. In the end, what you think of NASA has a lot to do with your political slant. For what it's worth, critiquing the use of money for NASA projects needs to be placed in the perspective in which, as of this writing, the United States military budget is 26 times the NASA budget. Our budget for spy and military satellites alone exceeds NASA's entire budget for science, exploration, education, aeronautics and environmental research.)
See Also: [A Man on the Moon, by Andrew Chaikin] [The Way the Wind Blew, by Ron Jacobs]
[Other books by Women Authors]