Customer Reviews

How Did That Sun Get Out

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Engrossing experimental use of language and compelling use of interior streams of consciousness as the characters attempt to come to grips with their personal lives and the political situation. Over all hangs the nuclear cloud which explicitly challenged that generation and which ours is all too liable to see it as a normal state of affairs.

The author is a writer, artist, and pacifist who incorporates long held non-violent beliefs into his work. Science, art, and the humanities are woven skillfully into this fictional story of learning, maturing, and friendship. His well-developed characters represent the first generation who realized destruction of all life on Earth has become possible through nuclear means.

C.J. Rongo is the inquisitive, idealistic progeny of an equally idealistic father who died young. C.J.'s father seemingly wills himself to die in the years following his military service. In a poignant letter to his toddler son - saved for C.J. to read as he starts college - the elder Rongo states his generation has increased evil by glorifying war and abandoned the decency of their futures. The college age C.J. has difficulty verbalizing an endless stream of thoughts, scientific ideas, and life questions but he is far from ignorant. Chapter One was difficult to follow at first, until I realized that this was my introduction to C.J. and his inability to express himself with eloquence.

The character of Colin Tsampas is introduced quite effectively through journal writings kept from 1945 through 1975. Colin is at first a student of psychiatry and then a practicing psychiatrist who simply cannot accept the times in which he lives. He questions why mankind does not create life enhancing opportunities with and for each other. His goal as a psychiatrist is to teach people how to be friends, how to care for one another, and how to love enduringly - traits seldom dealt with in human literature or education.

Jack Tane is a law student struggling to make sense out of a world he cannot believe in. His father is successful, old fashioned in the sense that he is an unquestioning patriot who supports political intrigue, war, and the American way of life to a maddening degree. Jack's family life has been superficial, an endless empty charade. Jack finds his upper middle class life unacceptable, and begins to question the wisdom of perpetuating such a life through the practice of law. He feels no way of life could be good and necessary enough to protect with such savage possibilities - nuclear weapons.

Leah Tetrao is ethereally lovely, desperate to make a lasting mark on the world through personal expression. When acting does not produce the results she seeks, Leah turns to art as her medium. Her parents are supportive, but their impending divorce is the final straw in an already unpredictable world. The world she hoped to influence through her creativity no longer exists.

Leah, C.J., Colin, and Jack are thrown together in sometimes uneasy alliances as they all four separately and together seek an acceptable reality. Goals and hopes are thrown off balance in the turmoil that was the 1960s in America. The looming threat of nuclear holocaust, the snuffing out in rapid succession of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the VietNam conflict take a lasting toll on four friends who cannot or will not adapt to such national horrors.

C.J. does not want to take courses in subjects he cannot personally care about. He finds life too complicated and drops out of one course after another. His relationship with Leah suffers because of his confusion.
Colin lives in despair due to his belief that man should be fighting the enemies we all share - hunger, cold, disease - instead of destroying each other. Jack's mind and health are nearly destoyed by his dawning realization that he cannot change the world, and learning an awful truth about his family. In C.J.'s practical approach to life and living, Jack finally finds personal peace. Leah finds her own peace in solitary protest, motherhood, and artistic expression.

I found How Did That Sun Get Out to be engrossing in a cryptic way I cannot explain. The characters were well developed and the writing sometimes breath taking. But nothing has really changed since the 1960s, politically or otherwise. War machines still make war seem patriotic and right. Despite medical and scientific advances, humans still suffer disease and starvation in a world awash in money, medicine, and food. I could not help but wonder at the end of this book, what C.J., Jack, Colin, and Leah must be thinking today.