In 1965, the young cinemist Arthur Penn was coming off his
career-making and Oscar-winning 2nd film, The Miracle Worker.
Given carte-blanche by the studios for his next project—he would
go on to become one of America's most influential and creative
filmmakers of the decade's midpeaks between 1965 and 1976 with
a string of masterpieces including Bonnie & Clyde, Little
Big Man, Night Moves, and The Missouri Breaks—Penn
directed a postmodern and existential vision that could only be made
under his “golden boy” parachute at the time. It starred then-unknown
Warren Beatty and was called Mickey One. A critic said,
to paraphrase, that trying to make a masterpiece, Penn made a mess
instead.
These circumstances are totally dissimilar from David Marusek's
debut novel, Counting Heads. There is no early, celebrated
accomplishment posted, unless you count hitchhiking to Alaska and
living there since 1973, as per the backflap bio. But just as Mickey
One was
anticipated with wild enthusiasm yet consumed with scratching heads
and yawns, author Marusek's novel is hawked by some of the
best on the back cover—Silverberg, Crowley, Kress, Cadigan, Goonan,
Dozois—yet
its ignition feels like a frantic array of conceptual sparklers looking
for a plotline before they fizzle out.
The novel's initial impression is fantastic. It quickly
establishes a relationship between two people so divergent that
pageturning becomes mandatory just to see why and how they can
get along. It also drops you into a dense but intriguing techno
soup of bewildering excess projected a century ahead. There are
the familiar SF tropes of longevity, holographic entertainments,
constant governmental observance, scarcely-credible nanotechnology
devices, cloning and robotics, and computer systems that do a far
more efficient job of running the world than humans. But quickly
after the main characters get together and receive permission to
have a child, the husband, Samson Harger--world famous artist esteemed
for his novelty gift wrappings—is probed by a security slug,
falsely judged a priority-level threat, and is “seared” (Tor, ISBN
0765312670, c.2005, p.36) as a fail-safe precaution, deeming him
a reprobate to society.
The child is born without his genetic imprint and, because his wife
is a newly-elected, political up-and-comer, the legal and social
aspects of their marriage are terminated. Samson becomes undesirable
for further technological participation in enhanced living and is
cast out from society's stream as a “stinker”, a sly
colloquialism referring to the aftereffects of searing that make
him smell “like a roomful of cat's piss” (p.43).
This is Part 1, entitled “We Were Out of Our Minds with
Joy”
and, coincidentally, was published separately as a short story
almost 10 years previously. It is a tight, controlled vision
on a personal, intimate stage, grinding together the themes of
love asunder and forced, social ostracization engendered by clandestine,
external forces. These intriguing plotlines are established at
full tension strength in the first 50 pages of the novel's 336-page
length.
Unfortunately, Part 2 defuses into 40 Years Later, focusing
on the leper-like Samson and his world enmeshed in baffling caste
or guild social systems populated with misfits and sub-humans slanged
as Lulus, Penelopes, Russes, Pikes, Steves, etc. His wife from
the past emerges, only to be immediately assassinated along with
their daughter, whose head has gone missing and assumed still alive.
The storyline of finding answers to these horrible assaults gets
dribbled out by the author's fascination of the future he's created
for us all with his brainiac tinker toy set. Words like “houseputer”, “gengineered”, “Hollyholo”,
start entertaining the lexicon like “visceral expression probes” (p.86).
The emphasis shifts to an externalization like that moment in Weir's The
Truman Show when the audience discovers Cristof running
the whole microcosm from above, and the affectionate communion for
interpersonal relationships is abandoned.
There are some wonderful ideas here, both old and new. But
ideas alone do not a novel make. And they were not enough to sustain
me into the second and third acts of this work. The creation of possible
futures are fantasies, but characters must be believably real for anyone
to care if it's a masterpiece or not. But judging by the professional
acceptance of his shorter works, a maturing David Marusek in a longer
assembly is
thoroughly
baited with anticipation.
xxxxxxxxx 
--Illustration by Viktor Koen from a photo by
Kenneth R. Kollodge
--Published March 5, 2006 in the NY
Times Book Review
