The cautious reader will detect a lack of authenticity in the following pages. I am not a cautious reader myself, yet I confess with some concern the absence of much documentary evidence in support of the singular incident I am about to relate. It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer.
I am the most unfortunate of men. When I was eight years old my father was killed in the war, and my mother was broken-hearted. My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. What began as a game, a harmless pastime, quickly took a turn toward the serious and obsessive, which none of us tried to resist.
What can I do? There is only one thing.
I don't know why I should write this.
I don't want to.
I don't feel able.
I'm having trouble remembering things. Small things, like where I put my keys, for instance.
It's fortunate I've dabbled a bit in psychiatry. I have faithfully served Yuggogheny County as its district attorney, in cases that have all too often run to the outrageous and bizarre. I should think the evidence was clear enough to corroborate my story, but I suppose I should have expected the reception it received from the police.
Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. I was interested in original sin and had dabbled in esoteric philosophy; my remote ancestors had been Salem witches. I owed the formation of my character chiefly to accident. I shall not pretend to determine in what degree I was credulous or superstitious. I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.
I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious fashion.
And then one afternoon ----
That afternoon, Mother introduced us to the man who was to be Father's successor in the household, and to his three children, who were to be our new brothers and sister, and we shook hands shyly, in a state of mutual shock.
Twilight was settling over L.A.'s Koreatown, the lights of the stores clicking off, the lights of the restaurants and bars flickering on. An inner voice warned me: Don't go! I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. It was in this sector of town, known generally as the East Side, that the brewers and tanners who made our city's first great fortunes set up their mansions. Their houses have a northern, Germanic, even Baltic look which is entirely appropriate to our climate. Of gray stone or red brick, the size of factories or prisons, these stately buildings seem to conceal that vein of fantasy that is actually our most crucial inheritance.
"As a matter of fact," the real estate agent snapped, "it is."
I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. The manuscripts were as I had left them, undisturbed. I sat at the table, slid on the cloth gloves, and began to read, following the first text with the index finger of my right hand, the second with the index of my left, my head turning from one text to the other. It had clearly been copied from a photocopy, and originally composed on a typewriter. I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. It was then that I first came face to face with myself -- that other self, in which I recognized, developed to the full, every bit of my capacity for an evil life.
Night had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. The silence pursued me like dumb ghosts, the still air held my breath, the hellish fog caught at my feet like cold hands. It was a female figure, dressed in black. She was seated on one of the lower steps of the scaffold, leaning forward, her face hid in her lap, and her long disheveled tresses hanging to the ground, streaming with the rain which fell in torrents. The flower heads were heavy with sodden, brown-edged petals and their stalks bent wearily as if cognizant of the fact that their lives were held by a tenuous thread that was soon to be snapped between the chill, biting teeth of an early frost. I was compelled to make a drawing of it, almost against my will, since anything so outré is hardly in my line.
On the worst possible stretch of dirt you can imagine, I blew a tire and discovered that my spare had leaked empty. In the darkness one of the computer banks began humming. For the smallest fraction of a second no sound issued from it but its own mechanical hum. The sparkle faded and died. There was silence on the line. Have you ever been on the phone, canceling a credit card or talking to your mother, when all of a sudden -- with a pop of static -- another conversation bleeds into yours? No longer a world of material atoms and empty space, but a world in which the bodiless existed and moved according to its own obscure laws or unpredictable impulses. My travels were at an end, for here was the end of the machine.
—Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2009
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Showing posts with label Astral Weeks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Astral Weeks. Show all posts
Monday, January 11, 2010
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Stories Are About Stories (II)
In last month's column, I pointed out some recent short stories that shine a light on their own construction. This month, we begin with David Marusek's clever epistolary yarn, "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz," in which the whole motivation behind the writing is tied up in the odd, repetitive title.
But then, every bit of correspondence, from a terse business e-mail to a tear-soaked confession on lavender-scented stationery, is a narrative with built-in motivation. Something is desired, whether it's the removal of a credit-card charge, or the return of a lover, or simply an expiation of the writer's guilt for not having written in so long. To effectively amuse or upset or inform, the writer must bear the recipient in mind, gauging tone and structure accordingly. The pages of the letter work like frames, fixing aspects of the relationship between writer and reader: their respective locations, the level of intimacy or enmity, the time since the last communication. Such considerations make the letter a sturdy form for the short story writers.
In the introduction to "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz," collected in "Getting to Know You" (Del Rey: 269 pp., $15), Marusek relates how elements of the plot had fermented in his head for years. It was only after attending a literary panel, in which magazine editors read "actual cover letters they had received from aspiring authors desperate to break into print," that he figured out how to write the story.
"Yurek Rutz" unfolds as a letter from one David Marusek to Gardner Dozois, longtime editor of "Asimov's Science Fiction." Marusek, "a borough zoning code examiner" whose literary career is a secret to his Fairbanks neighbors, accepts a strange commission by a not-quite widow named Emma Rutz: She wants him to compose her husband's epitaph. The rate: a thousand bucks for four lines.
Marusek confesses to Dozois that he writes to him "with grave misgivings" and to "pass along a certain questionable proposal." (Every letter is motivated.) Emma's husband, the eccentric Yurek Rutz, is ailing from Alzheimer's; Marusek learns that Yurek is distinctive only in his deeply narcissistic yearning for immortality. If Yurek's plan to keep himself cryonically preserved for future resurrection doesn't pan out, he's happy to achieve immortality via the world of letters. He's not a writer himself -- which is where the author steps in. Marusek will get a hundred dollars (from the Yurek Rutz Fund) every time he works the soon-to-be-deceased egotist's name in a published story. (Perhaps Marusek means to poke fun at those well-intentioned authors who agree to name a character after the highest bidder for a charity auction.)
Thus the letter to Dozois, replete with multiple instances of Rutz's name, becomes, in fact, the story itself (which Dozois, in the real world, published) -- a loop that's appropriately gimmicky and satisfying all at once.
As the title hints, Japanese writer Yasutaka Tsutsui's U.S. debut, "Salmonella Men on Planet Porno" (Pantheon: 272 pp., $21.95), bursts with wildly surreal situations. It too contains a loop story of sorts, "Rumours About Me," in which anything that happens to Tsotomu Morishita, the everyman protagonist, gets bruited by the mass media. One evening, the TV news notes that Morishita has been turned down for a date by a co-worker, then reports that "[a]ccording to well-informed sources, Morishita went straight to his apartment after work today, and is eating a meal that he prepared himself." It's a spryly absurd reduction of the very concept of narrative: It's literally what happens.
If nothing really happens, is it a story? It is -- if the frame is there, if the cameras are rolling, if anyone is paying attention. Narrative is in the eye of the beholder, and the simple fact of being observed changes the nature of the subject. Initially Tsotomu assumes that he hallucinated his appearance on the nightly news. Then the morning paper hits, with the headline "Morishita Rejected Again."
Any paranoid is a complete storyteller. In his version of the world, he's of utmost importance, the beleaguered point around which grand conspiracies (detected as the faintest whisper, a clump of bleached letters on a billboard) swirl. It's no great feat these days to satirize celebrity culture or the solipsistic virtual existences we create online, and by letting his conceit float in the realm of the fantastical, Tsutsui digs deeper. He externalizes all of Morishita's grandiose suspicions (triggered, we imagine, by his bungled attempts to woo the secretary), thus showing how a paranoid's auto-narration can work as an insanely incessant fiction.
The headlines alone are worth the price of admission:
"TM BUYS A TAILORED SUIT IN MONTHLY INSTALMENTS!"
"TM SLAMS CO-WORKER FUJITA OVER PAPERWORK ERROR."
"SHOCK! MOZZA'S SEX LIFE!"
When the world stops caring -- any narcissist's greatest fear -- the story ends.
The standout piece in "The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy" (Del Rey: 400 pp., $16), edited by Ellen Datlow, is also one of the collection's shortest. Jeffrey Ford's masterly "Daltharee" begins:
"You've heard of bottled cities, no doubt -- society writ minuscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick-spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pinprick faces of the citizenry peering from office windows smaller than sequins."
It's a sly strategy: "You've heard" slips us instantly into Ford's universe -- part of us always wants to appear in the know, so of course we've heard of those tiny worlds.
The city of Daltharee is one of these enclosed municipalities, and by the second paragraph Ford is already multiplying his conjurer's trick, giving us vertigo by presenting a miniature (a short story) about a miniature (a world that can easily fit atop a kitchen table). A conversation recorded by scientists (who are presumably the same size as us) reveals the inhabitants of Daltharee pondering the nature of their world, wondering if anything exists outside the glass.
The creator of Daltharee, the wayward scientist Mondo Paige (world on a page), is then reflected in the figure of the narrator himself -- or does Ford mean Ford himself? "Daltharee" ends on an exhilaratingly nightmarish note, with stories sprouting everywhere we look: "Each idea I have is a domed city that grows and opens like a flower. I want to tell you about cities and cities and cities named Daltharee." The narrator becomes his narration.
—Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20, 2008
But then, every bit of correspondence, from a terse business e-mail to a tear-soaked confession on lavender-scented stationery, is a narrative with built-in motivation. Something is desired, whether it's the removal of a credit-card charge, or the return of a lover, or simply an expiation of the writer's guilt for not having written in so long. To effectively amuse or upset or inform, the writer must bear the recipient in mind, gauging tone and structure accordingly. The pages of the letter work like frames, fixing aspects of the relationship between writer and reader: their respective locations, the level of intimacy or enmity, the time since the last communication. Such considerations make the letter a sturdy form for the short story writers.
In the introduction to "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz," collected in "Getting to Know You" (Del Rey: 269 pp., $15), Marusek relates how elements of the plot had fermented in his head for years. It was only after attending a literary panel, in which magazine editors read "actual cover letters they had received from aspiring authors desperate to break into print," that he figured out how to write the story.
"Yurek Rutz" unfolds as a letter from one David Marusek to Gardner Dozois, longtime editor of "Asimov's Science Fiction." Marusek, "a borough zoning code examiner" whose literary career is a secret to his Fairbanks neighbors, accepts a strange commission by a not-quite widow named Emma Rutz: She wants him to compose her husband's epitaph. The rate: a thousand bucks for four lines.
Marusek confesses to Dozois that he writes to him "with grave misgivings" and to "pass along a certain questionable proposal." (Every letter is motivated.) Emma's husband, the eccentric Yurek Rutz, is ailing from Alzheimer's; Marusek learns that Yurek is distinctive only in his deeply narcissistic yearning for immortality. If Yurek's plan to keep himself cryonically preserved for future resurrection doesn't pan out, he's happy to achieve immortality via the world of letters. He's not a writer himself -- which is where the author steps in. Marusek will get a hundred dollars (from the Yurek Rutz Fund) every time he works the soon-to-be-deceased egotist's name in a published story. (Perhaps Marusek means to poke fun at those well-intentioned authors who agree to name a character after the highest bidder for a charity auction.)
Thus the letter to Dozois, replete with multiple instances of Rutz's name, becomes, in fact, the story itself (which Dozois, in the real world, published) -- a loop that's appropriately gimmicky and satisfying all at once.
As the title hints, Japanese writer Yasutaka Tsutsui's U.S. debut, "Salmonella Men on Planet Porno" (Pantheon: 272 pp., $21.95), bursts with wildly surreal situations. It too contains a loop story of sorts, "Rumours About Me," in which anything that happens to Tsotomu Morishita, the everyman protagonist, gets bruited by the mass media. One evening, the TV news notes that Morishita has been turned down for a date by a co-worker, then reports that "[a]ccording to well-informed sources, Morishita went straight to his apartment after work today, and is eating a meal that he prepared himself." It's a spryly absurd reduction of the very concept of narrative: It's literally what happens.
If nothing really happens, is it a story? It is -- if the frame is there, if the cameras are rolling, if anyone is paying attention. Narrative is in the eye of the beholder, and the simple fact of being observed changes the nature of the subject. Initially Tsotomu assumes that he hallucinated his appearance on the nightly news. Then the morning paper hits, with the headline "Morishita Rejected Again."
Any paranoid is a complete storyteller. In his version of the world, he's of utmost importance, the beleaguered point around which grand conspiracies (detected as the faintest whisper, a clump of bleached letters on a billboard) swirl. It's no great feat these days to satirize celebrity culture or the solipsistic virtual existences we create online, and by letting his conceit float in the realm of the fantastical, Tsutsui digs deeper. He externalizes all of Morishita's grandiose suspicions (triggered, we imagine, by his bungled attempts to woo the secretary), thus showing how a paranoid's auto-narration can work as an insanely incessant fiction.
The headlines alone are worth the price of admission:
"TM BUYS A TAILORED SUIT IN MONTHLY INSTALMENTS!"
"TM SLAMS CO-WORKER FUJITA OVER PAPERWORK ERROR."
"SHOCK! MOZZA'S SEX LIFE!"
When the world stops caring -- any narcissist's greatest fear -- the story ends.
The standout piece in "The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy" (Del Rey: 400 pp., $16), edited by Ellen Datlow, is also one of the collection's shortest. Jeffrey Ford's masterly "Daltharee" begins:
"You've heard of bottled cities, no doubt -- society writ minuscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick-spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pinprick faces of the citizenry peering from office windows smaller than sequins."
It's a sly strategy: "You've heard" slips us instantly into Ford's universe -- part of us always wants to appear in the know, so of course we've heard of those tiny worlds.
The city of Daltharee is one of these enclosed municipalities, and by the second paragraph Ford is already multiplying his conjurer's trick, giving us vertigo by presenting a miniature (a short story) about a miniature (a world that can easily fit atop a kitchen table). A conversation recorded by scientists (who are presumably the same size as us) reveals the inhabitants of Daltharee pondering the nature of their world, wondering if anything exists outside the glass.
The creator of Daltharee, the wayward scientist Mondo Paige (world on a page), is then reflected in the figure of the narrator himself -- or does Ford mean Ford himself? "Daltharee" ends on an exhilaratingly nightmarish note, with stories sprouting everywhere we look: "Each idea I have is a domed city that grows and opens like a flower. I want to tell you about cities and cities and cities named Daltharee." The narrator becomes his narration.
—Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20, 2008
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Review of Brian Aldiss's HARM and Nick Mamatas's UNDER MY ROOF
Fifty years ago this month, the seminal British science fiction magazine New Worlds published a story emphatically if enigmatically titled “O Ishrail!” On board “the mental health ship Cyberqueen,” psychiatrists examine a man named Ishrail, who claims to be from a different part of the galaxy, although he looks and speaks like a human being. Ishrail once commanded a fleet of “interpenetrators,” starcraft made “not of steel but of mentally powered force shields” that somehow ride the “maze of stresses” (what the benighted still call outer space). He is a de facto prophet of things to come, an exile from a more advanced civilization — or else he’s just plain nuts. “Quite candidly,” one doctor explains, “there’s hardly a disorder in the book that isn’t present to a greater or lesser degree.”
Brian W. Aldiss, the author of that 1957 story, is now in his eighties, with dozens of books to his name. He vigorously remixes the old Ishraili conflict in a short, sharp new novel, “HARM” (Del Rey: 224 pp., $21.95). The title is an acronym for Hostile Activities Research Ministry, which you could call Orwellian if its operations didn’t seem so close to our paranoid present, drawing dark inspiration from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
“This was the time for seriousness,” Aldiss baldly announces, “for a war against terror.” In a Syrian hellhole, or possibly some isolated house in London, “HARM” tries to extract information from “Prisoner B” — full name Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali. He’s a comic novelist of mixed Indian ancestry, a second-generation Londoner with an Irish wife. (“I was born in Ealing,” he helplessly tells his interrogators.) He has Brit-lit bona fides: His first story was published in Granta and his latest book is intended as a Wodehousean amusement. But it contains a passage in which two tipsy lovers joke about assassinating the prime minister — enough to land Paul before his implacable torturers.
“HARM” reverses the formula of “O Ishrail!” Instead of wondering whether the hero is mad, we see how the Ministry’s absurd and hair-raising treatment opens a psychic fissure in Paul, causing him to imagine that he is on an entirely different world as a release from his wretched state.
Shortly after the imprisoned character recalls some lines from “Paradise Lost” (“The Stygian council thus dissolved; and forth / In order came the grand infernal peers …”[10]), a planet called Stygia blooms full-blown in his mind. This is the far future, when refugees from a wartorn Earth are deconstructed into molecular form to facilitate space travel. Once on Stygia, however, reconstitution goes awry; those colonists who survive lose their original identities and social relationships. Life on the new planet (with its six fragmented moons) becomes a grim, primitive mess of religious fundamentalism, political intrigue and the decimation of the native race, like a perverse mirror of our own world.
Aside from a few bursts of Joycean wordplay, “HARM” isn’t a book to enjoy. Indeed, Paul’s escapist fantasy sours from the start, with his Stygian alter ego, the thuggish Fremant, jailed and maltreated throughout. Aldiss deliberately brutalizes his prose to shatter any possibility of redemption, let alone beauty. The novel seethes with ugly set pieces (not just the torture scenes, but the sex scenes — even the loving ones), toggling between its earthly and alien settings with a horrifying seamlessness that gives the whole enterprise the shape of a fable.
Our daily news reports already seem like dystopian dispatches; instead of trying to trump the outrages, Aldiss uses science fiction to dramatize a mental meltdown. It’s no coincidence that the name of the spaceship bringing humankind to Stygia is New Worlds — the same as the magazine where many early Aldiss tales found a home. Like those future travelers, the decades-old conceit of “O Ishrail!” gets boiled down and hurled through time, and lands like a fresh insanity.
***
In his third novel “Under My Roof” (Soft Skull: 152 pp., $12.95 paper). Nick Mamatas works off a slightly different set of War on Terror jitters than Aldiss, aiming for humor rather than horror.
Here, Sept. 11 has been renamed Patriot Day; footage of the World Trade Center attacks, suppressed for years, is finally being broadcast. The collective tension has taken Daniel Weinberg, an unemployed Long Island autodidact, to the breaking point. “With every war,” Mamatas explains, “Daniel got more frantic … stay[ing] up all night and just walking around the dark kitchen and smacking his fist against the table.” Perhaps less ambitious than the planet-hallucinating Paul, Daniel declares his house and yard “free and independent from all law or governmental incursions of the United States of America.”
Daniel’s proclamation has some teeth: He’s managed to construct a nuclear warhead by harvesting the element Americium-241 from thousands of broken fire alarms heaped in the junkyard. Soon, the media, National Guard, and Homeland Security get interested in Weinbergia. The small Pacific island nation of Palau recognizes the new country’s sovereignty, and assorted dissatisfied Americans make the pilgrimage to 22 Hallock Road — hippies, nerds, “tax cheats, college kids who made up their own languages in their spare time, a woman who called herself Doctress Arcologia who wanted to build a treehouse outside my window.” Microstates spring up all across the country; “Brown University,” Mamatas writes, “was supposedly planning to secede next.”
“Under My Roof” is accurate, fast-moving satire that transcends mere target shooting by virtue of its narrator, Daniel’s 12-year-old son Herbie. The novel affectionately captures his age-appropriate cynicism and insecurity; at times, he’s a kindred spirit to the awkward protagonists of Daniel Pinkwater’s young adult novels. There is, however, one essential difference: Herbie can read minds. Mamatas lucidly and hilariously deploys his telepathy, allowing him to know all, see all and eventually transmit helpful information to allies in need.
It’s a parody of the surveillance and interrogation mania of the post–Sept. 11 era — the exact opposite of the excruciating and ultimately useless methods practiced in “HARM.” The scary thing about “Under My Roof” is that some readers might feel more secure being ruled over by a telepathic adolescent than by anyone currently in power.
[Originally appeared April 2007, latimes.com]
Brian W. Aldiss, the author of that 1957 story, is now in his eighties, with dozens of books to his name. He vigorously remixes the old Ishraili conflict in a short, sharp new novel, “HARM” (Del Rey: 224 pp., $21.95). The title is an acronym for Hostile Activities Research Ministry, which you could call Orwellian if its operations didn’t seem so close to our paranoid present, drawing dark inspiration from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
“This was the time for seriousness,” Aldiss baldly announces, “for a war against terror.” In a Syrian hellhole, or possibly some isolated house in London, “HARM” tries to extract information from “Prisoner B” — full name Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali. He’s a comic novelist of mixed Indian ancestry, a second-generation Londoner with an Irish wife. (“I was born in Ealing,” he helplessly tells his interrogators.) He has Brit-lit bona fides: His first story was published in Granta and his latest book is intended as a Wodehousean amusement. But it contains a passage in which two tipsy lovers joke about assassinating the prime minister — enough to land Paul before his implacable torturers.
“HARM” reverses the formula of “O Ishrail!” Instead of wondering whether the hero is mad, we see how the Ministry’s absurd and hair-raising treatment opens a psychic fissure in Paul, causing him to imagine that he is on an entirely different world as a release from his wretched state.
Shortly after the imprisoned character recalls some lines from “Paradise Lost” (“The Stygian council thus dissolved; and forth / In order came the grand infernal peers …”[10]), a planet called Stygia blooms full-blown in his mind. This is the far future, when refugees from a wartorn Earth are deconstructed into molecular form to facilitate space travel. Once on Stygia, however, reconstitution goes awry; those colonists who survive lose their original identities and social relationships. Life on the new planet (with its six fragmented moons) becomes a grim, primitive mess of religious fundamentalism, political intrigue and the decimation of the native race, like a perverse mirror of our own world.
Aside from a few bursts of Joycean wordplay, “HARM” isn’t a book to enjoy. Indeed, Paul’s escapist fantasy sours from the start, with his Stygian alter ego, the thuggish Fremant, jailed and maltreated throughout. Aldiss deliberately brutalizes his prose to shatter any possibility of redemption, let alone beauty. The novel seethes with ugly set pieces (not just the torture scenes, but the sex scenes — even the loving ones), toggling between its earthly and alien settings with a horrifying seamlessness that gives the whole enterprise the shape of a fable.
Our daily news reports already seem like dystopian dispatches; instead of trying to trump the outrages, Aldiss uses science fiction to dramatize a mental meltdown. It’s no coincidence that the name of the spaceship bringing humankind to Stygia is New Worlds — the same as the magazine where many early Aldiss tales found a home. Like those future travelers, the decades-old conceit of “O Ishrail!” gets boiled down and hurled through time, and lands like a fresh insanity.
***
In his third novel “Under My Roof” (Soft Skull: 152 pp., $12.95 paper). Nick Mamatas works off a slightly different set of War on Terror jitters than Aldiss, aiming for humor rather than horror.
Here, Sept. 11 has been renamed Patriot Day; footage of the World Trade Center attacks, suppressed for years, is finally being broadcast. The collective tension has taken Daniel Weinberg, an unemployed Long Island autodidact, to the breaking point. “With every war,” Mamatas explains, “Daniel got more frantic … stay[ing] up all night and just walking around the dark kitchen and smacking his fist against the table.” Perhaps less ambitious than the planet-hallucinating Paul, Daniel declares his house and yard “free and independent from all law or governmental incursions of the United States of America.”
Daniel’s proclamation has some teeth: He’s managed to construct a nuclear warhead by harvesting the element Americium-241 from thousands of broken fire alarms heaped in the junkyard. Soon, the media, National Guard, and Homeland Security get interested in Weinbergia. The small Pacific island nation of Palau recognizes the new country’s sovereignty, and assorted dissatisfied Americans make the pilgrimage to 22 Hallock Road — hippies, nerds, “tax cheats, college kids who made up their own languages in their spare time, a woman who called herself Doctress Arcologia who wanted to build a treehouse outside my window.” Microstates spring up all across the country; “Brown University,” Mamatas writes, “was supposedly planning to secede next.”
“Under My Roof” is accurate, fast-moving satire that transcends mere target shooting by virtue of its narrator, Daniel’s 12-year-old son Herbie. The novel affectionately captures his age-appropriate cynicism and insecurity; at times, he’s a kindred spirit to the awkward protagonists of Daniel Pinkwater’s young adult novels. There is, however, one essential difference: Herbie can read minds. Mamatas lucidly and hilariously deploys his telepathy, allowing him to know all, see all and eventually transmit helpful information to allies in need.
It’s a parody of the surveillance and interrogation mania of the post–Sept. 11 era — the exact opposite of the excruciating and ultimately useless methods practiced in “HARM.” The scary thing about “Under My Roof” is that some readers might feel more secure being ruled over by a telepathic adolescent than by anyone currently in power.
[Originally appeared April 2007, latimes.com]
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