From the author of the acclaimed and best-selling The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of extraordinary power about what it’s like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today’s astronauts.
At the novel’s center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight.
Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son’s asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant—perhaps unreachable—her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.
In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan’s narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives—the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the training—of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting—indeed a thrilling—novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.
Stephen Harrigan was born in Oklahoma City in 1948 and has lived in Texas since the age of five, growing up in Abilene and Corpus Christi. For many years he was a staff writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly, and his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of other publications as well, including The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Audubon, Travel Holiday, Life, American History, National Geographic and Slate. Many of his magazine pieces have been collected in the essay collections A Natural State (1988) and Comanche Midnight (1995). Another non-fiction book, Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992. Harrigan is the author of four novels. His first novel, Aransas, published by Alfred A. Knopf, was listed by the New York Times as a notable book of 1980. Jacob's Well was published by Simon and Schuster in 1984 and cited as one of the year's best books by The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News. In 2000, Knopf published his novel The Gates of the Alamo, which became a New York Times bestseller and notable book, and which received a number of awards, including the TCU Texas Book Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Spur Award for the Best Novel of the West. In April 2006, Knopf published Challenger Park, a novel about a woman astronaut torn between her responsibilities as a mother and her dreams of flying in space. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Thomas Mallon called Challenger Park "a fine, absorbing achievement, probably the best science-factual novel about the space-faring worlds of Houston and Cape Canaveral in the nearly half-century since the first astronauts were chosen." His latest novel, Remember Ben Clayton, will be published by Knopf in May 2011. Among the many movies Harrigan has written for television are HBO's award-winning The Last of His Tribe, starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene, and King of Texas, a western retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear for TNT, which starred Patrick Stewart, Marcia Gay Harden, and Roy Scheider. His most recent television production was The Colt, an adaptation of a short story by the Nobel-prize winning author Mikhail Sholokhov, which aired on The Hallmark Channel. For his screenplay of The Colt, Harrigan was nominated for a Writers Guild Award and the Humanitas Prize. Young Caesar, a feature adaptation of Conn Iggulden's "Emperor" novels, which he co-wrote with William Broyles, Jr., is currently in development with Exclusive Media, with Burr Steers attached to direct. A 1971 graduate of the University of Texas, Harrigan lives in Austin, where he is a faculty fellow at UT's James A. Michener Center for Writers. He is also a founding member of the Texas Book Festival, and of Capital Area Statues, Inc., a non-profit organization that commissions and raises money for monumental works of sculpture celebrating the history and culture of Texas. He and his wife, Sue Ellen, have three daughters, Marjorie, Dorothy and Charlotte, and two grandchildren, Mason and Travis.
I came to this book as someone very interested in the space program, and generally not someone that reads novels focusing on characters in relationships. I found the novel a worthwhile read. I suspect that not everyone will like it, and it will depend a lot upon personal taste - but it kept me engaged, even if personally a little frustrated by the ending.
Harrigan has a very understated, unhurried writing style that I enjoyed. Not similar to, but clever in the same way as, the writings of Gabriel García Márquez and Thomas Mallon. The novel's premise - an affair set against the backdrop of the space program - could (and probably has) been horribly done in the wrong hands. But this isn't a romance-novel-genre book. Harrigan slowly builds his story carefully and deliberately, with a subtle and elegant interweaving of the space program and personal relationships. Both plot elements drive each other without doing so too obviously. I suspect it may be too slow and nuanced for some people's tastes, but it kept me engaged and interested in reading new chapters every night.
Not being a NASA insider, it's hard for me to truly know how accurate this book is, but there seems to be an effort by Harrigan to truly reflect the lives lived by families working in Houston (both of astronauts and their co-workers), and it comes across as realistic. It vividly depicts how, while us non-astronauts probably imagine a spaceflight to be the defining moment of a life with the rest of life flowing up to and after it, life isn't lived that way: instead, a spaceflight finds a peculiar place in the middle of all-too-human demands of work, family and personal details. This book shows not only what a surreal job it must be to be an occasional spacefarer, but also the realities of spaceflight - the physical toll, the occasional boredom and isolation - it felt like a very real depiction of events that can often be overglamorized by others. It was interesting to compare to the works of Michael Cassutt, who with thrillers like "Missing Man" has used the same backdrop to very different effect.
My only real negative - and this was a personal perception - was that, having built up the story over 350 pages to a place where I was eager to see what happens, Harrigan wraps up the major plot points in 2-3 pages. That was in fact all he truly needed, and to stretch it out more may have been belaboring - yet it seemed like a rather sudden end. This may even be a hidden positive - he had me invested enough in the story that I wanted more, a longer resolution. But I was not frustrated enough to be annoyed to have read it, and in fact must respect Harrigan for taking the less predictable path, and ending the book in a way that most readers may not expect, but probably makes for a more original novel.
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The books that I didn't finish are few and far between, but this one is going on the list. Usually I try to give a book at least a hundred pages, but this one was such a snooze I had to set it aside.
As a long time space buff, it takes a lot to turn me off from anything about the space program, but this one isn't really about the space program. It's a romance novel, and a poorly written one at that. An entire page is spent describing the check-out line at a Luby's diner in tedious detail.
It would have been more fun to go outside and watch my grass grow. Stephen Harrigan owes me 45 minutes of my life back.
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I picked up a copy of this book last week and started reading with some trepidation--after all, it hardly looked like the sort of thing you'd read during spare moments over the weekend, but I thought I'd give it a chance. Still--a book about astronauts and personal dramas? Yes--and a compelling one at that. The author does a good job of establishing not only the human side of the story but delving into the technical as well--the chapter in which he describes the launch of the shuttle was especially well done and left me breathless. I don't want to delve too much into my caveat for fear of spoiling the book, but let's just say, for those of you who have read Jay McInerney's latest, that this book gets a bit 'Good Life-ish' at the end. Let's just say that certain characterizations in the novel lead to an ending that, while perhaps not wholly unexpected, is a bit disappointing. Still, this is a book that warrants a reading.
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
surly bonds, mission elapsed time, challenger park, donning stand, comm pass, integrated sims, sleep restraint, mid deck, ventilation garment, mission patch, orbit burn, sleep station
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Clear Lake, Road One, Walt Womack, Mission Control, Lucy Kincheloe, Buddy Santos, International Space Station, Service Module, Star City, Audio Scholar, Bay Area Boulevard, Cape Canaveral, Brian Kincheloe, Bay Area Park, Lucy Walt, New Orleans, Range Rover, Galveston Bay, Nancy Sinatra, Happy Meal, Public Affairs, Kennedy Space Center, Milo Thatch, Purple Plum Court, Krispy Kreme
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