Sometime this spring I realized that I only read classics or books that spent time on the bestseller list. Not to come off too hipstery, but I realized that this trend might be a problem because it means that the authors I support either already have enough attention or are dead. I hope to write and publish novels some day, and chances are I won’t be incredibly successful right away, so I figured I might as well set a good example and read something a little less popular. With that in mind I went into the local used bookstore* this week and picked out a novel based solely on this criteria:
1). It had to have a cool title
2). It had to have a cool cover
3). It had to be written by an author that I didn’t recognize
4). It couldn't boast any awards or bestseller status
In the science fiction section I found my winner: Neon Green by Margaret Wappler**, a novel whose cover and title promised to prominently feature green (my favorite color), suburbia (my favorite housing style), and aliens (my favorite life forms).
As it turns out, Neon Green was the perfect book for my experiment because I wouldn’t have found it any other way. The cover, the genre-designation, and the blurb on the back totally misdirect the reader. The sci-fi trapping probably turn off the literary-fiction readers who would love it, while the content would confuse the hard-science fiction readers who might be drawn to it.
The premise sounds pretty wacky and undeniably sci-fi at first. In an alternate version of the 90s, an alien spaceship lands in a suburban family’s backyard. But every detail of the novel past that goes out of its way to ground the story in a very realistic time and place. Aliens started landing in backyards in the 80s, so by the time the novel begins, an alien sighting is about as normal as winning the lottery: cool and unusual, but not the sort of thing to make it beyond local news. The aliens never communicate, no one knows what they look like or even if the whole thing is a hoax or not. It’s the most mundane alien-invasion imaginable. This a good thing in the end, because it clears the road for a subtle and slow but moving family drama which turns out to be way more interesting than the alien invasion that the cover brings to mind.
The plot revolves around the Allens, a well-to-do middle-class family living in the Chicago sprawl who win a sweepstakes to have a flying saucer from Jupiter land in their backyard. The family comes off almost as sitcom stereotypes at first, with two smart-mouthed kids, a dad whose environmentalism edges on fanaticism, and a loving mom. The spaceship works to give the characters depth more than anything, particularly the dad, Ernest, who is increasingly sure that the glowing green waste that the spaceship dumps is toxic. Everyone around him says that spaceships are entirely safe and there’s nothing to worry about, which puts the reader in a fascinatingly uneasy place. Used to images of aliens eating humans and burning up skylines, spreading a couple pollutants seems like a perfectly reasonable fear to most people. At the same time, we know that Ernest is committed to environmentalism to a point that makes him both annoying and almost pitiable. Overreacting about something innocuous seems perfectly in character for him.
I won’t get into how exactly tragedy strikes the family for spoiler reasons, but you only need to look at the quote on the front cover to know that this isn’t a happy book. Ernest’s quest to prove that the spaceship is the origin of all his misery makes it even harder to know whether to trust Ernest or not. On one hand, alien invaders still seem like a perfectly reasonable possibility, but on the other it is clear by this point that this book takes place in a very real world. It’s a world where questions don’t have simple answers, a world where fixing a problem is never as hard as identifying it in the first place, a world where there’s hurt but no place to solidly put the blame. Not even a flying saucer.
This place of profound and uneasy ambiguity is the center of the novel, and it’s an essential part of the setting. Typical suburbia is filled with plant life, blooming trees and clean-cut lawns, but all this natural life is manicured and arranged in a way that feels distinctly artificial. The 90s as a time period are in a sort of adolescence right now, not quite a historical era but not the recent past anymore either. Even the color green, which is a key motif in the novel, brings to mind conflicting feelings. It’s the color of natural beauty, but also the color of disease, radiation, and the spaceship’s unnerving and distinctly unnatural lights***.
At first the novel’s ending disappointed me. The way it resolves the burning anger and contradictions within the characters seems to suggest that cynicism is the ultimate answer. But even there, the contradictions remain. Is it cynicism or peace? Is there a difference? I don’t know, and I don’t think that anyone does.
There’s a quote I heard once (I forget where I heard it or who said it or what the exact wording was) that good literature kidnaps you late at night, drives you far away, and drops you off in a cornfield two states over, leaving you to wonder how to get home. Wandering into a used bookstore and picking out the first book with a cool cover did exactly that to me.
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* Which is Paperback Exchange in Minneapolis, by the way. It’s been my new favorite local bookstore ever since Barnes & Noble redesigned to make their space as much like a big box store as possible.
** My copy also came signed!
*** I couldn’t find a place where this worked into the flow of the review, but I do want to point out that the writing walks the fine line between being elegant and readable almost perfectly. My only complaint is that Wapples describes mundane actions with such detail that it feels like nothing is casual, everything is sacred, and there’s never any time to relax.
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