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Paul Russell's delicately layered, richly textured novels have won him widespread acclaim as one of the finest contemporary American novelists. Sea of Tranquillity, possibly his most ambitious and rewarding novel, traces a disintegrating nuclear family across two tumultuous decades of American life - from the early '60s to the '80s - and is told in a quartet of voices: astronaut Allen Cloud, his wife, their gay son, Jonathan, and his friend/lover. Ranging in time and emotion from the optimism of the first moon shot to the dark landscape of the age of AIDS, Sea of Tranquillity is an extraordinary and compelling novel.
Russell's third novel (after Boys of Life), a transplanetary sexual fantasia that chronicles the life of an astronaut's family in the age of AIDS, is so humongous in its attempted scope that it succeeds at a lot of things, among them confounding the reader. Told by four different characters in alternating sections, the book charts the lives of numerous people in such varied locations as Florida, Turkey, Africa, Washington, D.C., and the moon. There are characters who succeed entirely, like Allen Cloud, repressed astronaut, who goes into mental orbit when he discovers that his son, Jonathan, is dying of AIDS, and whose story is well realized through tight, realist writing. Yet the novel suffers from a plethora of imagery and a glut of metaphor: a grove of sycamores that die by the saw; the moon; various seas of tranquillity. The book's center, depicting Jonathan's sexual exploits and illness, is clouded by long-winded surrealist riffs and disjointed meditations on outer space. The fascinated speculation particular to Russell's writing works best when it's hitched to real-life objects-like Cloud's rocket-and not left free-floating in space. We are left dazed and tingly at the end, as if we had just witnessed an abortive moon mission. (Sept.)
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| $99.99 | Digital |
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Eric Soucy
reviewed Sea of Tranquility on December 09, 2016
Sea of Tranquility
I'm torn about how much I liked this novel. For the most part, the story and writing kept me intrigued and interested in continuing but, I feel, the author lost his way a bit during certain parts, and, in turn, lost me as a reader.
Sea of Tranquillity traces a disintegrating nuclear family across two tumultuous decades of American life - from the early '60s to the '80s - and is told in a quartet of voices: astronaut Allen Cloud, his wife, their gay son, Jonathan, and his friend/lover. The novel ranges in time and emotion from the optimism of the first moon shot to the dark landscape of the age of AIDS.
Compelling stuff, to say the least. And Paul Russell definitely captures the essence of the differing historic periods and the world of NASA, the space mission, and all the mechanics that entails. He also does a great job at capturing the early years of the AIDS epidemic, especially by honing in on just the one character struggling with the disease versus trying to incorporate the vastness of entirety of the crisis. Unfortunately, he doesn't quite capture the vastness of his own ideas as portrayed through the lives of these 4 characters (really, just 3 of them - the astronaut, his wife, and the son, as the friend/lover is the most mentally stable of the characters, despite his own familial issues). The enormity of Russell's grasp - the moon, the universe, the actual existence of man - might be too grand for anyone to fit into a novel but he definitely gives it a shot, with some success and some failures.
The characters are well drawn, for the most part, though their voices (each chapter is told from a particular characters perspective and it switches with each chapter) tend to sound a lot alike. There's one chapter toward the end that I'm still not sure who it was and I should have been able to by that point.
Overall, I have a feeling certain aspects of the novel will stay with me, haunt and dog me, which is a sign of a good story and good writing. But certain aspects will continue to frustrate me, as well.
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