Martian Dawn & Other Novels
Michael Friedman
(Little A)

A not-insignificant proportion of experimental fiction broadcasts itself by breaking boldly with mainstream literary forms in order to serve a recognizably literary function. You can usually identify these books at a glance, by their idiosyncratic typographies and/or self-reflexive narrators. The worst of them transpose formal pyrotechnics for humor and humanity. Michael Friedman’s Martian Dawn & Other Novels, though it’s about as weird a book as books come, does not make this mistake.

Martian Dawn & Other Novels is actually an omnibus edition of three novellas: Martian Dawn, published by Turtle Point Press in 2006; Are We Done Here?, completed in 2009; and On My Way to See You, in 2013. The latter two are published here for the first time. The subjects they tackle, collectively and individually, include: Hollywood stardom, planetary colonization, the film industry, love affairs, holograms, Amazonian missionaries, pop culture, casual Buddhism, psychotherapy, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. On every page there is something funny, sad, weird, or some combination thereof, conjured by Friedman’s deadpan tone, pile-up of cliche and detail, and the placement of quotidian characters into absurd situations (or vice versa).

Let me illustrate by way of example: Martian Dawn concerns a Hollywood power couple, Richard and Julia, who are called back to work to reshoot the botched ending of a science-fiction film called Martian Dawn. The shoot takes place on Mars. Richard is a world-famous actor and a Buddhist dilettante, friendly with the Dalai Lama, who spends his free time following Rinpoche, his Tibetan dharma-to-the-stars, on the international lecture circuit. Until Richard met Julia, she was a hooker at the Baby Doll Lounge, “taking on all comers at $500 a pop.” Now she, too, is a world-famous actress, who spends her free time shopping on Rodeo Drive and reminiscing about her former lover/pimp, Angel. When the novel begins, she’s on location shooting Cat Fight at the OK Corral—“the story of supermodels on the loose in Manhattan.”

Attentive readers will recognize that Richard and Julia are based on Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, and the characters each plays in Pretty Woman. This becomes evident in the first chapter. From there, the cast expands to include a Weinstein-esque film producer and his psychotherapist, who’s in love with him; the sequestered inhabitants of a biosphere in Arizona; four cosmonauts orbiting and flirting in space; and a reporter for Whale Quarterly named Cap, who has strong feelings for the solitary blue whale in the biosphere. They eventually all meet up on Mars, which has been colonized. Would you even believe me if I wrote that it all comes together?

Are We Done Here? and On My Way to See You don’t adhere to common sense either. Are We Done Here? pogoes between the Manhattan demimonde, an Amazonian village, and the Betty Ford Clinic, while On My Way to See You is a murder mystery, set in France, concerning a vanished gay writer, his holographic doppelgänger, a drag queen in Nice, and an author named Ben Berkowitz who has a wife and children back in Williamsburg, several girlfriends/lovers on the side, and a list of unfortunate phobias that includes French furniture.

None of these characters is developed much beyond their signifiers. They’re mostly defined by comically outsized self-absorption, but this flimsiness keeps them pliable for Friedman’s screwball plots. He moves them around like board game characters. Their shallowness also makes them easily skewerable as avatars of various pompous delusions: Hollywood arrogance, spiritual empowerment, ego superiority. They speak in banalities and pronouncements that skew just off-course from the patter of recognizable human conversation. They find themselves adrift in situations that veer from real to surreal and back again. In Are We Done Here?, two characters confront their lovers about an affair:

“Don’t be coy,” Lisa insisted. “Let it all hang out. It’ll do you worlds of good. Don’t even think about denying it. How long?”

Thomas did his best to maintain some composure. “Uh…um…not long—”

“Two years,” Harper blurted out.

“Oh my God!” Lisa gasped.

Thomas’s jaw dropped, and he shot Harper a horrified look.

Lisa pulled a Luger out of her handbag.

“Is that a Luger? Amazing. Where did you find it?” Thomas asked.

“eBay. Now up against the wall, motherfuckers!” she shouted, waving the gun around.

“Give me the gun, Lisa,” David instructed.

Or take this exchange, from Martian Dawn, in which Svetlana, a sexy Russian cosmonaut and the author of From Borscht to Crepes Suzette, a cookbook, comes on to her American counterpart in space, a schlub named Walter:

“This is sex module. Do not try to fight it, Walter. Do not make me beg.”

“Phew! Is it hot in here, or is it just me?” Walter asked, pulling at his collar with his index finger.

“You are helpless to resist. You are in my power. You will do as I say,” she cooed.

“Point taken,” he murmured.

Afterward, Walter finds himself wondering:

What had just happened? Was he developing something more than just a passing interest in Svetlana? Were they going to do something—sometime soon? And how was her carbonara sauce?

Friedman, who is also a poet and a commercial law attorney in Denver, is that vanishingly rare combination of “weird and virtuosic,” to quote from Molly Young’s introduction to this volume. Like any good satirist, he distorts his characters in order to reveal something flawed and funny—and human—in them. He’s perverse and weird and yet his work is still inviting—though you can never be entirely sure that he’s not pulling a fast one on you. Phillip Pantuso

Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own
Kate Bolick
(Random House)

“Whom to marry, and when it will happen–these two questions define every woman’s existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does and doesn’t practice.” Such is the wisdom—and unfortunate opening—of Spinster, a new memoir-ish book by Kate Bolick. Bolick, a 40-something editor for the Atlantic is a satisfied single—and don’t you forget it. (She loves being alone, okay?) But going solo wasn’t easy for her. Spinster, then, is a ledger of her struggle, or a map to Bolick’s own sovereign land. Spoiler alert: Bolick, through spinsterhood, makes a life of her own. And how!

Spinster is part-autobiography, part-manifesto, and a smattering of women’s history. We meet Bolick’s mélange of suitors: her college beau, the enterprising co-editor, the fling, et al. Eventually, Bolick jettisons the whole fleet for solitude, haters be damned. Along the way, she finds her idols: five women of the Edith Wharton variety, whom she calls her “awakeners.” (more…)

Hall of Small Mammals: Stories
Thomas Pierce
(Riverhead Books)

The characters in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals are bone collectors, particle physicists, hot air balloonists, TV show hosts, comedians, mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, believers and apostates, and would-be initiates of a cultish scouting society called the Grasshoppers. Across a dozen short stories, their concerns orbit a resurrected clone of a long-extinct dwarf woolly mammoth species, a visit to the zoo to witness a rare monkey species, an unidentifiable infectious disease, and a theoretical subatomic particle called the daisy, amongst other things. Their worlds are recognizable yet strange, imaginariums of the possible that feel like extensions of the probable, existing in “a universe a few inches to the left of this one, perhaps,” as Pierce himself has said. (more…)

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty
Amanda Filipacchi
W.W. Norton & Company

Beauty is inescapable, perhaps now more than ever. To a certain degree, of course, it’s true that beauty—physical beauty—has always been omnipresent, if not tyrannical; there have long been muses, models, and manifold examples of women whose beauty has the power to do everything from stop traffic to launch a thousand ships. And yet today, the insistence of beauty’s importance is particularly relentless, due in no small part to the preponderance of social media and selfies; it has become impossible to get away from the carefully curated images that people present of themselves, images chosen to showcase beauty and hide imperfections. Even though an argument could be made that beauty has a more expansive meaning now, as we live in a time where ad campaigns are centered around the premise of promoting “real beauty” and a more diverse (though far from societally representative) array of body, hair, and skin-types are represented in mass media, the reality is that the importance of beauty is at least as powerful as it has ever been.

And so into this cultural climate comes The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, Amanda Filipacchi’s darkly funny, surreal novel about a group of New York friends, all of whom are struggling in one way or another with the the role beauty plays in their lives. The story centers around two dichotomous characters, Barb and Lily, and the way in which their beauty—or lack of it—profoundly affects their ability to find love and happiness. Simply put, Barb is beautiful, and Lily is ugly. Lily’s extreme ugliness, which the reader is assured can not be fixed by surgery or makeup (something about her eyes being too close together), is matched only by Barb’s extreme beauty (you know the drill: aqua-colored eyes, silky blonde hair, etc.), and it is made clear from the start that each woman’s genetic fate has sharply colored her life.

In Lily’s case, her ugliness has led to a life devoid of romantic affection; despite being an inordinately talented musician (she composes music that can turn literally any object—even junk mail—into something powerfully desirable), Lily cannot capture the attention of the one man she loves—a caddish, mediocre violinist named Strad (yes, after Stradivarius). For Barb, her beauty has proven more of a curse than a blessing: Her best friend, a man named Gabriel, killed himself by jumping out of his apartment window in an effort to die at her feet, rather than live with his unrequited love for Barb. After this happened, Barb costumed herself in a disguise comprising a fat suit; frizzy, gray wig; glasses and muddy brown contact lenses; and false, crooked teeth. Barb finds her beauty and its effects too much to bear, while Lily isn’t sure she can bear life itself because of her absence of beauty.

The novel has a very all-or-nothing approach to beauty—few of the other characters are given much of a physical depiction at all—but this extreme version of life in modern New York (complete with a murder mystery, masked lovers, an obscenity-spewing doorman, and a dinner party from hell) never really loses the weight of its message: Even if we can recognize the unfortunate importance of beauty in our lives, it doesn’t mean we need to accept it without a fight. Filipacchi’s novel is not a treatise against beauty, instead it attempts to hold up a mirror—fractured though it already may be—to our society to show more clearly what the costs of our glorification of beauty just might be.