Austinist Review: Spaceman Blues: A Love Song by Brian Francis Slattery

Kurt Vonnegut was the little booger hanging on the up-turned nose of literature. He kept the sci-fi and fantasy genre from getting too one-dimensional, and he helped reel the “literary world” back in from too much self-aggrandizement.

For decades his cynical humor and desperate energy pulled at the spindly awkward adolescent us, and gave us something we could claim as our own. He got us to suspend our disbelief and see the same-old same-old through new eyes. He made us say 'wow' and 'why?' He excited us. He was hyper-real, he was super surreal, and then he was just dead.

So it goes.

Is it possible that the burning excitement of discovering an author like Vonnegut is limited to that hormonal young age when everything feels like a tumbling free fall? Was it puberty that made it so intense and meaningful?

Yes. Of course it was.

But some rare times an author's twisting prose can let you catch a momentary bubble burst of that intensity again. Brian Francis Slattery's debut novel, Spaceman Blues: A Love Song, captures and bottles moments of that energy. In a manner that would make Vonnegut crack a wry smile, Slattery props up the corpse of the American Dream and parades it through the waking dream that is his novel. He is no Vonnegut, but he isn't trying to be either.

His almost lyrical writing reveals people and places that are at once tragic, hilarious and strange. The setting is a near future New York nearing the end of the world. Amidst underground cock-fighting rings in underground cities, washed-up Australian new wave bands turned smugglers, strange religious cults and what very well may be an alien invasion, our hero Wendell searches for his lover. Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González, who has abruptly gone missing, is perhaps the lynch pin that holds this strange world together.

Or tears it apart.

To toss around some great names like Pynchon, Lethem, Doctorow, or (god forbid) Dick is to miss the point. This is Slattery's first novel, but his literary pulp adventure has him poised to become literature’s new booger. Kilgore Trout would be proud.

Photo by Jugbo on Flickr

Book Image from Tor Books