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[jfb]

I've just finished a book which is good and strange: Radiance, by Carter Scholz. It's a nightmarish story about politics and science in an unnamed DOE lab in the mid-90s, about the methods used by the defense industry to assure survival after the cold war, and about at least one character's psychological meltdown under pressure.

The most striking thing about the book is probably its prose style, a sort of stream-of-perception approach where every half-heard sentence fragment, every road sign or paperback novel that comes to the protagonist's attention is catalogued, interrupted sporadically by lyrical description. Part II of the novel begins:

Past the toll plaza the bridge stretched into morning fog and low clouds that obscured bay and sky alike until the center span climbed out of this gray limbo into a brilliant haze through which sun smote the driver's window and curdled the horizons to brown smutch, while a jet poised like a raptor overhead and thundered in falling glissandi as Highet pressed A/C MAX and turned up the radio to, --first day of spring in the Bay Area record highs expect, punching over to the orotund tones of, --Great American Broadcasting network, your host Tuck Eubanks ladies and gentlemen, the conservative voice of truth, prosperity, and fun, back in a moment, and hurtled down the span's far side through Redwood City where the only trees to be seen were blue gum eucalyptus and sycamore, past Your Company Name Here 415-282-0110 and SINATRA 4th Show Added Mar 31, tapping the brake as taillights reddened in all lanes ahead, swerving from behind SQUANDR to thread between 386SX and FOOBAR, punching the radio to --clones lowest prices guaranteed at Computer Addict Sunnyvale, downshifting to third then second as Versant, Data General, Hexcel, Informix, and Failure Analysis Associates went by, cutting in front of ELUESIS to brake sharply under a small black billboard in white Futura italic SAVE US FROM WHAT WE WANT as the radio continued, --Caltrans hazmat team on the scene 101 southbound at Moffett three lanes closed, and stabbing the selector again, as if a more congenial reality awaited on another channel, --my friends, I am expounding and commenting on a cultural decay happening in this culture, his hand traveling on to pick up the cellular phone, --Dan Root, please, this is Leo Highet, as traffic locked to a dead stop.

Not all the sentences are that long (the opening sentence: "Quine approached the Lab on a road that led nowhere else."), but some of them are. At first it's hard to follow, but eventually you can just immerse yourself in the flow of it.

Here's a Salon review, which compares Scholz to Pynchon and Ballard; he reminds me somewhat of Michael Tolkin, and an Amazon customer review says his style is lifted directly from William Gaddis. I haven't read Gaddis, but Scholz wrote his obituary for Salon, so that's probably the best reference point.

Comments

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Hm, part of Hulk was filmed at LBL, and here's a book that sort of takes place there? I should tell mom that now that she's planning on leaving, her workplace has finally arrived!