Book Review: Neon Green by Margaret Wappler

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.

_________________________________________

* 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. 

Forgotten Gods

A daily bit of writing I did this spring for the prompt "Forgotten Gods."

I was never a particularly popular god. I was the god of prophecy, specifically the kind of ironic prophecy that predicts tragedy, only to have it come true in everyone’s mad scramble to dodge it. Immortals never learn. But one day my stilted ex-lover, the goddess of sewing, got a very thin pair of needles and reached in my ear to pull my gift of prophecy out of my brain, then ate it herself. Makes no sense at all, but I guess I’ve got no right to complain when I’ve been getting by on these mythological hijinx my whole never-ending life.

Once my future sight went blind, the gods kicked me out of the heavens. I sat on the earth, watching the colored lights in the sky flicker and hearing music echo out across the land like thunder. They were having a party because the goddess of sewing was suddenly able to see into the future, bumping her up from a minor deity who only got prayers from the occasional frustrated seamstress to a real member of the pantheon. 

The party died pretty quickly when she predicted doom for our people, and this time there was no clever twist. She didn’t even present it in verse. No sense of art at all (no mystery why I ditched her for a spider demon, which is how I got into this mess in the first place). She just told everyone that, in a couple of weeks, missionaries would arrive on our shores. Within a few generations, a blink of the eye for a god, no one would believe in us anymore. 

We were never a particularly friendly pantheon, but we got that way once no one would listen to us. The monsters, the spirits, the demons, and the gods all put aside our millennia of feuding to keep each other company in the heavens while our monuments on earth that hadn’t been smashed eroded under the natural elements that we were supposed to control. Eventually things up above got so lonely that they let me back in, if only because they needed someone else who believed in us.

We thought that we’d pick up some new worshipers when anthropologists started reading our ancient texts. But they didn’t believe in us, they just wanted to study us as dead myths, really only important for how we influenced local government or family structure (as if we gave a damn how those mortals wasted their lives). 

But sometimes, when a college students stays up all night memorizing our names for a test, or when a scholar mentions us in the footnotes of an article, the heavens light up like they did the night they threw me out. So we’ll grant a little luck on the hapless academic toiling below. It might not be worship, but it’s the best we’ll get these days.

My Paparazzi Phase

Sorry for not posting this Monday. Between finals, coming home, and going to New Haven to see my brother’s graduation, I’ve been hard up for time. 

On that note, the trip to New Haven was amazing. Aside from the obvious joy from seeing my brother graduate the Harvard of Connecticut (which is a cut above my school: the Harvard of the Iowa), it was full of striking images. That comes with the territory, being at an Ivy League University, but even aside from the ancient campus, I was taken by the little house where we stayed. The enormous window in the living room gave a panorama of the ocean and we could hear the tide crashing against the seawall at all hours, both of which gave the impression that we were living on a boat more than a house. Between the interesting setting and the obvious importance of the occasion, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that my dad and grandfather were always sneaking around the edges of the action, snapping photos of every angle of the post-grad interactions. Still, it got on my nerves a little, especially when I was stuck in the awkward situation of realizing that someone is trying to surreptitiously take a photo of you and suddenly becoming very aware of your posture and pose.

Now I’m back in Edina, surrounded by the landmarks and people of my middle and high school years, and I’ve started to realize that getting mad at anyone for taking my picture is sort of hypocritical. After all, for most of my Edina years, I kept a little Flip video camera in my pocket and whipped it out so often that a significant percentage of my adolescence is currently hogging the memory on my family computer’s hard drive. 

I used to tell myself that I filmed just about everything in order to save it and remember it. That’s probably part of it too, I started filming just around the time I started realizing that my memories of my childhood in Waco were fading. My habit came on the heels of a series of nightmares where I was walking around my old house, everything exactly as it had been, until I went into a room that I couldn’t quite remember and found it was a blank white cell with no exit. There definitely was some anxiety about forgetting my life at that time, and a foolproof strategy seemed to be keeping the camera rolling and pointed at things I wanted to remember.

But there was more to it than that. By filming I made a very distinct personality, even earned the briefly-used nickname “random video kid.” In developmental psychology class this year I learned about the metrics for measuring a kid’s social standing, and on that scale I’d probably fall into the “controversial” category, reserved for the rare kid who has some good friends and real enemies. Some people appreciated the novelty of my videography. Weirdness for weirdness’s sake is usually a good bet in middle school. But others, rightly, saw it as an invasion of privacy and sort of creepy. If I hadn’t been me, I probably would have been on their side. But I was me, and as a kid who had spent quite a bit of time in the “neglected” category (no peer perception, positive or negative), any attention was good attention.

The real answer was a combination of the two, I think. I wanted to remember these times, but in a very particular way. I’d turn three months of my life into a three-minute clip show of me and my friends having fun, set to my favorite songs at the time (some of which I still really like and some of which embarrass me to this day). It gave me a sense of authority over my life, not just to remember thing as they happened but to control how I remembered them, and to make a name for myself in the process. There’s a song I’ve been listening to obsessively the past few days, “One Man Wrecking Machine” by Guster, about trying to relive adolescence, not as it really was, but the way it’s portrayed in movies. That really speaks to my mindset at the time. Only I wasn’t just trying to remember it as a movie, I was trying to make it into a movie, one that was bright and silly and constantly moving and that decidedly did not feature all the hours I spent alone in my room playing with Bionicles and doing homework. My friends who were okay with being filmed cooperated by doing something filmable every time I turned the camera on them. One of them even noted in one of my vlogs that it feels like he’s acting. 

But my dad and grandad weren’t manipulating anything when they snuck around snapping photos, they weren’t trying to catch the moments for anything other than what they were. That shouldn’t be surprising, my dad and grandad are wise people, and considerably more mature than I was at 14 (or now than I am now, for that matter). 

Looking back on it, the videos that I still really cherish were the ones where I did the same thing at my dad and grandad, where I captured the moment for what it was. 

It was the summer after ninth grade. My cousin Stephen had died a week before. Most of the family spent the first few days after the death at my grandparents’ house in Grosse Pointe, but the only time we were all together, all of us but Stephen, was when we met up for an informal memorial on the beach of Belle Isle. We sat in a circle, talked about how much we missed him, and threw flowers into the Detroit river. Halfway through we were interrupted by a yellow ice cream truck playing a happy little melody that pulled up a few feet away. It seemed so much like Stephen, a bright and musical and happy thing cutting off the solemn conversation. I filmed it as we were leaving, more out of habit than anything. Then I heard a rhythmic clapping behind me, and I turned around to film and see my brothers and cousins and uncle, marching shoulder-to-shoulder and clapping to the tune. It was silly and strange and tragic, the perfect encapsulation of our memories of Stephen.

That’s something I’m glad to have on video.

Religion

A friend of mine in middle school laughed when I told him I was a Christian. He didn’t believe me until I pulled up photos of my confirmation. It's not that he had anything against people of faith, he later told me, he was just surprised because I didn’t fit the Christian stereotype. 

This would be an excellent transition into a rant about how people shouldn’t make assumptions and anyone can have a religion, but I’m not going to. Like it or not, pretty much every identity you can have has a stereotype to match, and it’s fair to assume that when it’s an identity you can choose like religion, some other qualities might tend to covary with it while others might not. For example, being a liberal who spent his weekends playing occult themed tabletop RPGs on and often made jokes at the expense of fundamentalists, I didn’t really seem like the perfect model of a young Baptist (though now that I’m an Episcopalian, I might fit that bill a little better).

There isn’t a whole lot of religion in the student body of Grinnell, it’s a niche interest that’s under represented even in religious studies classes. Again, there’s some prime rant fuel here that I’m not going to touch. Mostly that’s because the whole “why isn’t everyone just like me?” argument doesn’t work so well when your faith is inspired by a constant fear of death.

Still, I wonder why other people at Grinnell are so willing to accept that there’s no afterlife, or to not care if there is one or not. For me, existential fears are like an infection that I can’t stop pressing to see how bad it hurts, and it hurts pretty bad. To think that we’re just organic robots acting out whatever inputs nature and nurture enter into us, that all the billions of people who have died and will die will mean nothing once they’re forgotten, that even the strongest feeling of love is just a flood of neurotransmitters biologically programmed by the dispassionate science of evolution, it’s overwhelming, isn’t it? It’s more than anyone can handle. So most people don’t think about it. But I can’t not think about it. 

Here’s what I believe: Humans used to have a lot of questions about how the world works. So we came up with some really incredible stories. Then some buzzkills found out the real answers and sucked the joy out of storytelling, saving a lot of lives with improved technology in the process. But we’ve still got one question that science hasn’t answered, that science can’t answer because any answer just begs the exact same question: where did it all come from? If matter and energy can’t be created or destroyed, then there must have been some starting point. There must have been some intelligence at the beginning, something that wrote the natural laws and built the atoms and activated them with energy.

I’ve been told by people who are braver about their faith than me that this explanation is religion with faith bled dry. That’s a fair point, but not entirely true. There’s one question of faith left on the table: did this intelligence intend life? It’d be consistent with scientific evidence to say no, that we’re just some mold that happened to grow on a planet just the right distance from the sun. That the trillions of stars and planets and even maybe other universes matter so much more than our tiny drama taking up a speck of time and space. But that’s depressing beyond words, so I’ll say that this intelligence cares about us. They have somewhere for us to go after we die. Maybe they even speak to us, guiding us towards choices that make the most of their creation (though I don’t think they ever have the final say on what happens, there have been too many tragedies for that to make sense). 

I think this intelligence at the start of the universe is beyond human comprehension. The same way we can’t logically conceive of something coming from nothing, no doctrine will ever explain them. But we can come to that understanding on an emotional level. And for me, that emotion comes from a miracle worker from Galilee. By all metrics He was just another story by people before science, except that He didn’t explain a thing except how to be a decent human being, something science has yet to unanimously contradict. And why couldn’t He have been born in a manger, healed lepers, told God’s word, died on a cross, come back for an encore performance, and ascended to haven? It makes about as much sense as something coming from nothing. And it feels right. 

Which is all extremely easy scratching into paper as I procrastinate studying for finals. It’s a little harder living in the real world, explaining why I can’t be at cross country practice on Sunday morning or putting a few bucks in the offering plate or worrying about death. And that’s just a fragment of all I know I’m called to do. But keeping it in mind as I go through the world, sometimes it almost seems to make sense. And that’s all I’ll get, so it’s all I’ll ask for.

A Treespeak Soliloquy

Two years ago, when I had some time to kill, I tried my hand at writing poetry. At first it was about my childhood but, as discussed last week, my childhood and Bionicle are nearly inseparable  so after a while it morphed into the ruminations of my favorite character, Lewa, whose plot arc was abandoned on a cliff hanger when they abruptly stopped updating the story. For context, Lewa spoke in a dialect of conjoined words that often used predictable metaphors (for example he would say "Life-dawn" instead of "childhood") I tried submitting it to a few fanfiction poetry magazines, but it turned out to be too niche even for them.

When I was wind-riding

Away from my fellow toa-heroes

(Because they were boring-dull),

I was capture-trapped and choke-tied 

By bad-strange small-folk.

Then Greg Farshtey

Decided spending time with his daughter

Was more important than continuing the story

Of a Lego franchise that was canceled

More than a year ago.

Ever since then,

With no forward-moving plot-line,

I’m still capture-trap choke-tied

With the bad-strange small-folk.

It’s been a boring-dull eight years.

Eight years in purgatory-hell

Is a long time to hard-think

About sad-strange question-thoughts.

Like what are there five boy-toa

For every one girl toa?

Why are there gender-norms at all?

We’re robots, we don’t make-love.

Which is actually a real-shame.

It sounds like good-fun.

Or why, when was I so high-flying sing-song happy-good

With the five-to-ten year-old age-demographic

Back in my life-dawn,

Are the only people who still care

Man-child computer-nerds

Who should really grow-up and move-on?

Did I really fight swarms of dark-bad Nui-Rama,

Have a Karana control my brain-thoughts,

Live under the rule of an evil-bad world-master,

And save the universe,

Only to be under-stuck

A German pump manufacturer,

A wildlife conservancy,

And a Chinese Android ROM

On the Wikipedia disambiguation-page?

To stink-rot

In a thousand forgotten toy bins?

Of-course-not.

I’m a Lego-toy, Lego-toys don’t stink-rot.

Plastic lives immortal.

But we do decompose.

We’re broken down into our component parts

And made anew

By the children-spawn

Of the first-owners.

It’s not a bad fate.

My Bionicle-centric Childhood

A few weeks ago I reflected on how deeply ingrained the media we consume is in our lives. If that’s true for your typical college student, it goes double for kids. From my time working at a toy store, I know that pretty much every kid has a single all-consuming interest. Of course, I was no exception. If you subtract Bionicle from my childhood memories, basically all that’s left is my lesser devotion to Avatar: The Last Airbender and a whole lot of Sunday school (where I had compared Bible stories to the Bionicle mythos so often that there was a specific rule against it).

It’s hard to describe my obsession with Bionicle nowadays, because with my liberal arts student mindset, any explanation inevitably turns into an apology. My most recent one went something like this: “It was this Lego line of buildable action figures that ran for about ten years, and it was so awesome! It was about these robots living on this island and it had this really cool futuristic-tribal theme going, though actually it turned out that the whole thing was controversial and sort of cultural appropriation because the company used a lot of Maori culture and ended up getting sued for copyrighting words in their language. Also, the villages were gender-segregated and there was only one female for every five males, so that was weird. But the story was so cool and complex and really too long for anyone to understand, with all these alternate universes and time travel and in the end it just stopped making sense.” And then, while the person who I was trying to explain it to stared at me blankly, a random bystander who’d overheard the conversation walked up to us and said, “Hey, are you talking about Bionicle? Man, wasn’t that awesome!”

It’s become a sort of inside joke at this point. Everyone who was in on its ten year run thinks that it was the best story ever told, but no one can really articulate why. I’d be willing to stake my life that it was ten times better than Transformers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Club Penguin or any other kid obsession out there, but I have absolutely no reason for it. Maybe it’s just hard to divorce yourself from something when you lived and breathed it for ten of your most formative years, the way people whose apocalypse predictions don’t come true always say they were just wrong about the exact date. Because I immersed myself with Bionicle for as long as it was around. I didn’t just buy the toys and watch the movies, I had Bionicle notebooks, Bionicle shoes, I read the comics and played the video games and nearly memorized whole sections of the incredibly esoteric online serials.

Maybe I was so into it because it came into my life at such a critical period. I got my first Bionicle as a toy in a McDonald’s Happy Meal when a family friend took me out to lunch so my mom could spend time with her newborn baby. Then there were about ten years when I knew the lore well enough to rattle off the full biographies of even the most trivial characters. And then news broke that it was ending a few days before my parents announced that we would move to Minnesota.

It was a disorienting time for me, so I wallowed in what I knew. Unpacking my Bionicles was the first time our new house really began to feel like a place where I could live. Since I couldn’t buy new sets anymore, I started making my own, breaking down my massive collection, painstakingly organizing them piece-by-piece, and building my own models. At that time I was trying to rebel against the move in a variety of passionate and wildly ineffective ways, most notably avoiding the number thirteen (we’d moved on my thirteenth birthday), which no one noticed but eventually morphed into an acute case of triskaidekaphobia that I still haven’t managed to shake. Sinking into my Bionicle collection was the same sort of thing. By spending all my time with it, I was proudly announcing to no one in particular that the world where Bionicle was still around, the world where we still lived in Waco, the world where I was still in elementary school, the world of the past, was the world I wanted to live in. 

At the time the Bionicle fan community was reacting in much the same way, with an explosion of sites trying to recapture the nostalgia for the story we’d all grown up with. There was a bandwagon of teens who had been with the toy line since it began and didn’t want to give it up making their own amateur Youtube channels showing off their own creations, and I was among their proudest, least successful members.

I think it’s actually the Bionicle Youtube community that killed the nostalgia. Seeing people make sex jokes and use slurs in the comments of videos about my beloved childhood merchandise got me get fed up with how they were taking the symbol of my perfect time in Waco and turning it into something as corrupt and ugly and adult as the stuff scrawled on the bathroom walls of my middle school. So I let the interest die, stuffed my sets in the closet, and started spending my days hanging out with classmates instead.

A few years later, I found out that Bionicle never was the perfect symbol of childhood in the first place, not even from the start. The guy who wrote the story had brain cancer, and he took pills every day to kill it. He got the idea for Bionicle when he imagined tiny soldiers inside the pills that would fight off the evil and some day let him rise again, healthy. Even from the inspiration for the story, that ugly adult world was there.

I don’t take out my Bionicles much anymore. Of course, I couldn’t take them to college, and even when I’m at home I’ve used the parts so much that most of them are snapped or on the verge of snapping, and I’ve still got enough of a reverence for them not to want to break my last sets. Still, I can name pretty much all of the main series characters (though I’ve forgotten most of the minor ones) and it’s still hard to think of my time in Waco without the brightly colored warrior robots I worshipped when I lived there jumping to mind. As much as I’ve outgrown them, I think I needed them when they were around, to provide an outlet for my childhood obsession, and even afterwards as a way to hold on to the past until I was ready to let go.

The Wampus

This will mark my first summer in six years not working at Kiddywampus, an awesome independent toy store in Hopkins. Luckily, I’ll still be associated with the store by ghost-writing for the Wampus, some kind of benevolent monster that lives in the store and answers letters kids send in. So far the project hasn’t gotten off the ground yet, but I was able to write a couple practice responses to experiment with the voice. I tried to make my responses silly and kid-friendly, which meant I inevitably fell back on anthropomorphization. My work was deemed funny, but maybe a little too sophisticated for our target audience.

Question: Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Peeled.

Peeled who?

There are crickets on your desk.

The Wampus's Answer: Thank you kindly for the crickets you left on my desk. I often find myself working late at night at my desk, keeping up my regular email correspondence with Santa and so forth, when I need a cricket to proofread a particular sentence with the eye for grammar and word choice that only crickets possess. But then I need to go outside, look for a cricket, convince that cricket to take time out of its busy schedule to do a bit of copy editing, and that's all just so much work! But with so many crickets on my desk, I can hardly pick up my pen without them chirping a chorus helpful suggestions! It's wonderful, if a bit disorienting when they all speak at once, we really need to work out a system for that. If I may inquire, though, who was peeled, and why were they knocking?

Question: If a train leaves Chicago and is moving 65 miles per hour towards Boston, how soon will it meet a train that is leaving Boston traveling at 70 miles per hour if Chicago and Boston are 2700 miles apart?

The Wampus's Answer: Well, it's certainly good to hear that the trains are going to meet each other! I've personally known many trains who are so exhausted by zooming around the country hauling lumber, coal, passengers, and such, and just want a few seconds to slow down and have a nice conversation with a fellow train. I bet their playdate will go well. From my experience, Chicago trains are excellent listeners while Boston trains love to tell stories, which seems like the perfect match. I do hope they slow down, though. Going at 65 and 70 miles an hour, they probably won't have much time to talk when they meet 20 hours after departing.

No New Post This Week, But...

I did get an essay published in Inklette! Check it out here.