There are many reasons to read Brian Francis Slattery's debut novel, Spaceman Blues: A Love Song, but the best one is the opportunity to witness the magic of his sentences. He depicts an entire world in poetry, a beautiful and complex world that spurns reality in favor of the fantasy of language. Rarely is my enjoyment of a book so strictly formal, but here in Spaceman Blues, the wonder I felt while reading was based on the structure, the delicately shifting point of view, and the captivating sentences, and not so much on any tangible emotional involvement with the characters or plot, which is nebulous at best; a man disappears, his lover tries to find him, becomes involved in a secret underworld, sort of turns into a superhero and attempts to fend off an alien invasion.
But the story is about so much more than that -- the immigrant experience, the idea of the world being huge and unknowable: "Above him, the whales are gathering, preparing for migration: they know of a stretch of ocean that is warmer and brighter than this place, where the current teems with sweet krill and there are no hunters in rusting ships trying to kill them. But it is thousands of miles away. It could take years to get there." And also: "He believed in his bird too much, put everything he had on it; now it is gone, and as the blood seeps to his skin he understands with an awful simplicity that he is stranded alone in this alien place, and does not know what he is going to do."
The idea of being "stranded in an alien place" is such an apt metaphor for the experience of reading Spaceman Blues (which is remarkably Pynchonesque in its scope and tone, and also bears significant resemblance to The Crying of Lot 49 in structure), for it is a novel that takes you places you could never have imagined, complex places of unknowable beauty. But even as it shows the desperation of the immigrant experience, it also reveals the hope; commenting on a character's failed effort to create a technology enabling travel via vacuum tubes, a policeman notes, "There is something heroic in it. ... One day, when our spacefaring descendants lose control of their craft and fall into black holes, if they survive the friction, the intense heat, they will go the same way, as they approach the singularity, the heart of what could have been a supernova.'" It is the hope that even in failure we will find something new, something that we could not possibly have known was there; maybe an entire world under New York City, maybe an invading alien force. There is adventure in living wholly within the moment:
Somewhere there are bands who are just getting warmed up, bands who haven't started playing yet, who will be heard only by those lucky enough to be there, limbs ready to move, throat ready to unleash howls when each number is done. They are living hours tonight that they will return to fifty-seven years from now, when Death is coming for them. They will remember how the band played and how they moved, or the way that girl moved, they will hang their pride on the faith that it was good enough; that they lived enough, that they were here. But they do not think of that now. They have no idea what's coming.
This has become one of my favorite novels, and I have tried to tell you why, even as I'm still trying to explain it to myself. I hope it doesn't get lost in the noise, though, as it's a book worth holding onto, worth reading again and again simply to get lost in the rhythm of its prose, the exuberance of its passion for New York City, for love, for human relationships. It is both light and dark, simple and complex, funny and sad, and should be treasured for being all of those things at once, and more.
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