I suppose this is how we grow up: by learning that even implacable principles are in contention. One day the world is fixed forever, without cause, effect, or mitigation. We respond naïvely and mythically: clusters of stars tell obvious stories (only a cynic could doubt the design in Orion's Belt); seasons arrive and depart by grace alone; disease and death are bestowed as punishments. Miniature people inhabit our radios, and everything in the world, living and dead, possesses a soul. Then suddenly the spontaneity deserts us. We embrace new authorities – books and teachers, movies and friends – we become transmitters. We learn of light-years and vacuum tubes, sound waves and psychology. We push back the borders of permissible innocence.Lunar Attractions is the story of David Greenwood – a tubby, dreamy, out-of-place child – and in several short story-like episodes, we watch him grow into a tubby, dreamy, out-of-place adolescent. David spends his early years in central Florida – nowhere near the ocean and orange groves; this is swamps and intestinal worms and estivating mudfish lurking beneath the sandy soil – where his Yankee parents (that's his word, although I'm skeptical about it as a descriptor for a European Mom and a French Canadian Dad) are too old and too foreign to secure David's place in society. Tormented by his white trash teacher for his early reading skills and his left-handedness, David retreats into private study, where he fills his head with facts and trivia (later dismissed as “wise-idiocy” by a white trash psychologist.) With a doting mother and a pugnacious father, David is pulled in opposing directions, never quite fitting in anywhere.
David is saved by a move to the “nearly North” of Ohio when he reached high school, where he finds a group of other cerebral and oddball kids to hang out with. This is apparently the part of the book for which Lunar Attractions is most famous. I was led to this title by this article about a publishing company that has rereleased underappreciated Canadian books; an article in which Barbara Kay says that “Lunar Attractions is superb (and, by the way, contains the most aesthetically deft explicit sex scene I have ever read).” I really thought that was a parenthetical comment until I read on the back of the book this blurb from The National Review : “The most ferocious and astonishing scene of adolescent sexual first contact ever written: in English: in fiction.” While this scene is astonishing, as well as pivotal for David's character, it likely had more impact when this book was first released in 1980.
Lunar Attractions reads like a Saul Bellow or Mordecai Richler novel: a fairly detached examination of the post-WWII Montreal-Jewish-male-now-living-outside-Canada experience; rich with the dirty underbelly of the American Dream and its inaccessibility for those who aren't quite American enough. Author Clark Blaise is a Canadian-American and this book isn't quite Can-con, although I understand that he was considered an important Canadian voice when it was written (before he decamped for the States for good). As a proud Canadian, I laughed at David's reaction to discovering that he had dual Canadian and American citizenship as well:
The idea had thrilled me, like learning I'd been adopted or had a sister somewhere. And the fact that I was something unplaceable, Canadian, and not something more easily identifiable had appealed powerfully to me. No one knew what it meant. Something very close but still different; the essence of mystery. I felt like a spy, a shadow, someone with a secret identity.David's constant scrutiny of his identity and his feelings of dislocation make for a very masculine story, and like Herzog or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, I could appreciate the art of what was written without really being able to identify with the story itself (and conversely, I would understand if men didn't get as much out of Marian Engel's Bear as I did). Four stars for the art of this, and the final scene:
The music came back louder than ever and I found myself clutching the same door frame for support until the spasms passed and then I ran far from the parked cars to lie in the grass under the sun and to wait for the god to invade my blood.
"You know, you look just like your brother now."
I hadn't meant to humour her -- I'd meant it, I think, in the spirit of madness to which I was also party; I meant, in essence, there is no difference between us except degree of criminality, which meant degrees of boldness. Never could I have imagined such acting out; never could I have demanded such obedience from the rest of the world. She lay still on the floor. She, in the process of rising, him...I walked home greatly relieved that we, the two sexes, were not so different after all. I imagined that the girls in school all wore different kinds of balls or rubber devices in their bras, which accounted for the different effects they gained. It was merely a social expectation that dictated the choice of sex; after a certain age, those who'd been told they were boys finally were given a suit and tie. Soon they were rewarded with the need to shave. And those who'd been raised to become women started stuffing their chest with rounded objects and wearing dresses and makeup. It was only primitive women, like the ones in Natural Geographic, who grew them naturally. And, I must have thought, with my fat and ever-pink nipples, too bad they hadn't decided I should be a girl. Probably I would have done better at that, and without too many props.
