Spaceman Blues: A Love Song by Brian Francis Slattery (Tor)

This certainly must be one of the weirdest books I’ve read in 2007. On the back cover of this slim novel published in the US by Tor this August, Jim Knipfel (whoever he may be) describes the experience of reading this book as : “It happens only very rarely – you read a book by a new author, and all you can say is ‘wow’. ” I would like to seize this opportunity to replace that ‘wow’ with three words. What. The. Hell.
Honestly, I have rarely encountered a work before that is so confusing, so profoundly strange – that I can not make any sense of it. There’s neither rhyme nor reason to it. It is, quite frankly, beyond me. Despite everything I tried to find a way to like it, to appreciate it for what it was. I simply could not.

The synopsis of this novel is quite simple, giving you with the false impression the novel’s going to develop in a fairly interesting direction.
“When Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González disappears, Wendell Apogee decides to find out where he has gone and why. But in order to figure out what happened to Manuel, Wendell must contend with parties, cockfights, and chases; an underground city whose people live in houses suspended from cavern ceilings; urban weirdos and alien assassins; immigrants, the black market, flight, riots, and religious cults.” Pretty clear, huh? Well, try to understand what kind of story the author is telling when you are reading the book. As soon as you start reading, you’re left with is surreal, hyperbolic, hallucinating non-sense.

The main reason why the novel is inaccessible and falls flat on its face, is the prose. All over the internet in the reviews I’ve read on this book, Slattery is lauded for his musical, jazz-like prose*. Needless to say, I disagree. You might say it has some musicality to it, but you might just as well say that it is damn near unreadable. The prose seems to be some sort of mix of sentences that drag to long combined with too many incoherent impressions buried in it. All at once. You’re literally assaulted with words, thoughts and actions. This citation illustrates my point:

” On the highway across Broad Channel, out to the Rockaways, between the Italian neighborhoods and the closed communities that line the beaches, there is a place where the land becomes skinny, the soil dissolves into marshes, and the city gives way to weather-battered buildings and tackle shops, slanting wooden houses with windsocks nailed to the back that look over the broad expense of Jamaica Bay: flat water spotted with clumps of grass, laced with the wakes of motorboats, the sky above broken by the planes landing at Kennedy. Far away, beyond the water, the skyscrapers of Manhattan spike above the land, silver and gray, unreal.” (p. 30)

Has this guy ever heard of punctuation? I just wrote two sentences, and already this citation proving to be longer in length than the average Harriet Klausner review. Keep in mind, this is just one citation – the book’s filled with them. It was literally a struggle for me to finish this book.

Another citation from the book illustrates the assault you’re about to undergo when picking up this piece of weirdness:

” The buildings twist, their colors change, cars mumble and rock in their places the voices of the people picking through his belongings fade, their bones move, talk to each other. A wave ripples through the street, sets up a beat, long and low, a thrum that brings murmurs out of the curbs, leathery voices from sewer grates, keening calls from the streetlights that bend down and sway over cackling debris. And now the houses move and speak, the panels of the side-way stomp and clatter, and it all spreads outward, washing over the city until everything is alive in a deafening dissonance, a throng of rising cries that make Wendell reel, until Masoud grabs his arms and tells him come on, come on.” (p. 66)

You still follow me? See what I mean?

On top of that, Brian Francis Slattery attempts to portraits the immigrant society of New York by introducing various characters. Playing it loose with time and space, he further adds to the mess and confusion by switching point of views frequently. For example the character Wendell Apogee is developed into some superhero “Spaceman”. He then proceeds to shoot the Four Horsemen with arrows and saw them in sevenfold with circular circle-saws. This shows you how ridiculous some of the scenes are.

In the end, Spaceman Blues: a love song comes down to is this: It is just impossible to discern any interesting ideas in the confusion mess the author (intentionally I presume) created. And maybe if the novel was billed as a satire of brittle, modernist urban fiction I’d be kinder to it. But since it appears to be a piece of fiction that takes itself serious – I won’t. The novel falls flat on its face because it goes beyond simply telling a story. It tries to be stylistically innovative, to be surreal like a Dalí painting, to be a kaleidoscopic celebration of immigrant life, to play it loose with time and place – but ultimately forgets to simply tell the damned story. That it why I picked up the book for in the first place, not because I wanted to revel in surreal imaginary, but because I wanted to know why the hell Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González disappears and how Wendell is supposed to find him back. This novel does not present satisfying answers to those questions and thus fails in my opinion.

4/10

* I don’t like Jazz.