My Sixth Grade class was in the library that Friday afternoon when Mr. Saffronoff led us back through Northwood Elementary School's ancient hallways to our classroom. We were being let out of school early. The president had been shot. As I walked home alone down the tree-lined street I was filled with vague and unsettling fears. Was America vulnerable and unprotected without the president?
It would be years before I revisited the America I grew up in, hoping to understand as an adult the events that had shaken my childhood's sense of security--The Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of President Kennedy and later his brother Robert and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War and the daily body count on the television news.
At 600+ pages, I was uncertain I wanted to read Big Bang, but the subject matter was too tempting.
The book begins with Jonathan Lethem's essay on his friend David Bowman, calling Big Bang "docu-fiction," "an epic novel about celebrity and power in the postwar twentieth century," a "mammoth project" about "everything and anything" Bowman knew about postwar America. The Foreword ends by telling readers that all of the people and events are based on "true history."
I found a densely woven correlation of events and personages so intricate as to astonish. Bowen had created a literary, "six degrees" link chart of interconnections that is all-embracing. Of course, the Kennedys are central along with all the necessary Washington figures, but also making appearances are J. D. Salinger, William S. Burroughs, Howard Hunt writing pulp fiction and planning the secret invasion of Guatemala, Richard Nixon and his Checkers speech, Carl Djerassi and Robert McNamara in an Ann Arbor book club, Lucille Ball facing the McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee...
Just to give you a taste.
Bowen suggests that after the Atom Bomb, the second "big bang" to change the world was the Kennedy assassination. It changed a lot of things, for sure. It set off a chain of other political assassinations.
The novel was a journey into the world that shaped me. I have to wonder what my son's generation will make of Big Bang, Millennials for whom the 1950s and 60s are ancient history?
I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Big Bang
by David Bowman
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date 15 Jan 2019
ISBN: 9780316560238
PRICE: $32.00 (USD)
