Let us now praise famous men (and women)
From Sinatra and Maria Callas to Oswald and JFK
In the first four pages of “Big Bang,” author David Bowman introduces Norman Mailer, JFK, AnnMargret, Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon — an ambitious start.
And the cast list expands rapidly: William S. Burroughs. CIA operative (and future Watergate coconspirator) E. Howard Hunt. Arthur Miller. Marilyn Monroe. A flying-saucer-obsessed Seattle kid named Johnny Allen Hendrix. Robert McNamara, Benjamin Spock, Jackson Pollock. Frank Sinatra, Albert Camus, Montgomery Clift and Maria Callas.
Mr. Bowman’s self-proclaimed “nonfiction novel” is a portrait of America from 1950 to 1963, told chronologically and collage-style. It’s an epic patchwork of vignettes depicting these personages and many more living through personal trauma, cultural upheaval, domestic politics and the building Vietnam crisis. “Big Bang” is a gripping pseudo-narrative: The structure is justified solely by the serendipity of all these events happening at once. Mr. Bowman takes what he has gathered from coincidence to construct a “story” that pulls us onward via our fascination with the backstages of these celebrated humans, a sense of fatedness, and the “big bang” waiting on Nov. 22, 1963.
In theme and scope, “Big Bang” recalls Don Delillo’s “Libra” (a novel about Lee Harvey Oswald) and also Mr. DeLillo’s epochal “Underworld,” both of which also draw on famous lives to limn the mid-20th century. (Mr. Delillo himself is a character in “Big Bang.”) Mr. Bowman’s novel is broadly factual — the research implied is astounding — but with zestful imaginative leaps and crisply entertaining dialogue and description.
Here’s Cold Warrior E. Howard Hunt popping a gasket over Castro’s Cuba in 1960:
“Hunt held the phone as he was consumed with a biblical rage of grief. Hunt stood gnashing his teeth in a horrible grimace, his cheeks pulled up into the bottom of his eyes in a reptile squint, his lips peeled back from his teeth in a rapid snarl. The tendons on his neck were the width of celery stalks. Both ears were flushed red.”
Did Arthur Miller and Saul Bellow pal around in Reno? Did Sinatra quote “Moby-Dick” while entertaining a crowd on Aristotle Onassis’ yacht in the Mediterranean? Who knows, but it’s all a blast to read. A 1953 French-restaurant dinner with JFK, Jacqueline Kennedy and future South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem is an especially exquisite comedy of manners and hidden tensions.
Mr. Bowman’s style ranges from aphoristic — “The hunger for burgers was as American as the Pledge of Allegiance” — to discursive. But “Big Bang” is more than brilliant mimicry. Mr. Bowman tips us early on that his themes include our struggle with the dead weight of history; he consistently points out, for instance, when his characters were born in the 19th century, as if to emphasize the hold those tintype years and gas-lamp mores still had many decades later. His heroes include the artists who slough it all off — Pollock, Hendrix, the young Bruce Lee — all avatars of “[f]luid American modernity.”
The book also describes a struggle with the dead weight of, well, death: This novel must contain a dozen miscarriages, many of them Jackie Kennedy’s. Another theme is the betrayal of common humanity by the enlightened and privileged. (Here Mr. Bowman really has it in for old Mailer — but who doesn’t anymore?) Yet another strand ponders the weird allure, and transmogrifying influence, of fame itself.
While “Big Bang” gets pretty baggy at times, it’s consistently involving and almost compulsively entertaining. But it’s got a bigger problem: Though tuned to the absurdity of machismo, Mr. Bowman is nonetheless magnetized by it. And quite unfortunately, most of his characters both major and minor are alpha white males. Given the time period depicted, it’s almost shocking, for instance, that this historical cavalcade includes no mention of the civil rights movement, let alone any figures from it. What is Mr. Bowman’s schema that it can accommodate pages on Nixon’s Checkers speech but not a word about the “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Brown vs. Board of Education, or the March on Washington? Just what was he thinking?
Well, we can’t ask him. David Bowman died in 2012, at age 54. “Big Bang” is his third published novel.