‘Bizarre’ is the best word to describe this novel by the Vancouver- based author, discussed by a friend who shall remain nameless. Set largely in Florida leading up to the launch into space of an adult thalidomide girl lacking a hand, her entirely evil relatives congregate to celebrate, knowingly spreading HIV infections far and wide with their indiscriminate sexual conquests. Even the married girl astronaut is unscrupulous, planning to conceive a baby by the married NASA mission commander while circling the earth.
There are endless time shifts even within chapters as the debauched characters reflect on their past lives. I constructed a mental family tree to try to keep the characters straight but the tangled relationships remained blurred. There are innumerable highly improbable chance encounters and the characters all survive after being shot, abandoned in alligator- infested swamps, and kidnapped by equally evil international drug dealers and baby abductors. At times the plot was so improbable as to resemble magic realism.
I persisted to the end, hoping for some memorable lines and a unifying theme but found nothing either enlightening or memorable except this ambiguous quote: “… blame is just a lazy person’s way of making sense of chaos.”
Novels often benefit by inclusion of rogues, but here they abound and are not even likeable. John Irving’s rogues, such as Ketchum with his repeated exclamations of Holy constipated Christ! in Last Night in Twisted River, are at least realistic and endearing, but here they are just the incarnation of evil.
This is trashy pulp fiction at its worst. The only feature that could make it worse is graphic descriptions of the abundant sex. I cannot recommend it to anyone.
The Passionate Reader 