“Reading Martian Dawn is like watching an ultracool comedy of the future where familiar movie types develop into idyllic interplanetary characters in order to make yet more movies. It’s as though Star Trek, Pretty Woman, and There’s Something About Mary had been sublimated in an unlikely fusion that is both comforting and hilarious.”—Harry Mathews
Book Description
“Reading Martian Dawn is like watching an ultracool comedy of the future where familiar movie types develop into idyllic interplanetary characters in order to make yet more movies. It’s as though Star Trek, Pretty Woman, and There’s Something About Mary had been sublimated in an unlikely fusion that is both comforting and hilarious.”—Harry Mathews
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A Richard obviously based on Gere and a Julia obviously based on Roberts are called back to work reshooting—on Mars—the botched ending to a science fiction movie, Martian Dawn. Julia, in an earlier life an exotic dancer at the Baby Doll lounge in Phoenix, has just finished work on Cat Fight at the OK Corral, the story of "supermodels on the loose in Manhattan." Richard, a devout Buddhist, has been following his dharma (and his spiritual teacher, Rinpoche) around the country, bedding women on the side. Meanwhile, two of the sequestered inhabitants of a self-contained biosphere experiment in the Arizona desert are sneaking out at night for pizza, while Russian and American astronauts, two women and two men, orbit overhead flirting with each other. And elsewhere in the comically off-kilter universe of this larky debut novel from poet Friedman (Species), a man in a bar is obsessed by Monstro, a pet baby whale who has been freed into the Atlantic. Friedman (by day a commercial law attorney in Denver) skewers Hollywood pomposity, environmental idealism, spiritual empowerment—and the surprising banality of a human outpost on Mars—with prose that's a marvel of economy, sardonic without excess sarcasm and rife with deadpan humor. Slight but sly, this is a scrumptious literary trifle. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Friedman is the author of 6 books and chapbooks of poetry. His work has appeared in Great American prose Poems (Scribner, 2003). He was educated at Columbia, Yale and Duke. Former Chairman of St Marks Poetry Project he now practices law in Denver and teaches in Naropa's MFA program.
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More About the Author
Poet Michael Friedman's debut novel, MARTIAN DAWN, is out from Turtle Point Press in New York City in September 2006. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including the book of prose poems SPECIES (The Figures, 2000). Since 1986 Friedman has edited the influential literary journal SHINY. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including GREAT AMERICAN PROSE POEMS: FROM POE TO THE PRESENT (Scribner, 2003) and in many journals, including American Poetry Review and New American Writing. He grew up in Manhattan and was educated at Columbia, Yale and Duke. Friedman moved from Manhattan, where he practised law in a large New York law firm, to Boulder in 1995 and has lived in Denver since 1998. He has taught in the MFA writing program at Naropa University in Boulder. By day he is a practicing attorney in Denver.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finding Meaning In Society and Out of It--With a Martian Twist,
By Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Martian Dawn (Paperback)
I've written so much about Michael Friedman's work that some people will think me a hired hack, but as much as I'd like to be able to boast I've had a check from Friedman, I'm out here on my own every bit as lonely as Irene Cara in FAME. In the meantime Friedman's MARTIAN DAWN arrives with a resplendent, evocative Neutra-inspired cover by the painter Duncan Hannah), who previously did the drawings for ARTS AND LETTERS, Friedman's 1996 book of linked prose poems). Hannah picks right up on Friedman's inspired vision of Mars not as the haunted red planet but as instead an alternative vacation spot like Palm Desert or maybe, Scottsdale. His novel is a sort of travelogue, in which sophisticated earthlings find spiritual renewal by visiting a warmer place where they can dry themselves out, so naturally it has affinities with A NEST OF NINNIES, the novel Ashbery and Schuyler wrote in the 1960s about suburban Long Island.
MARTIAN DAWN, however, has a vaguely futuristic feel to it, as it deals with persons and institutions known to us in the present day--such as Naropa, the Buddhist poetry seminary of Boulder, Colorado--and Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, here left floundering in the wake of their huge success with PRETTY WOMAN and not really knowing how to follow it up properly in a Hollywood increasingly without borders. Have any of you seen the Pauly Shore-Kylie Minogue vehicle BIODOME (1996), in which she plays a Teutonic scientist sequestered in a Mojave biodome with a pair of goofy American stoners played by Shore and Stephen Baldwin? Friedman liberally shakes and stirs BIO-DOME's flimsy plot until it shimmers into a confetti of brightly colored nouns, adjectives and verbs. It isn't all chuckles and Ronald Firbank hijinks however. Last night we watched EUROPA 51, Roberto Rossellini's exploration of postwar malaise, with Ingrid Bergman as a vapid socialite who, once she loses her son, panics and loses her place in the world until she finds a path towards sainthood. It's no accident that the various couples in MARTIAN DAWN have similarly lost the plot, and found themselves instead at a spiritual crossroad. "It's like MOBY DICK meets THE APARTMENT," says an aspiring screenwriter, trying to pitch a script about "Monstro," the whale. The Rinpoche (the worldly Tibetan monk to whom the Richard Gere character has apprenticed himself) has his own moment of realization, as he relaxes with a whiskey sour in the Ritz-Carlton of Mars. "He remembered Blackie Friedlander telling him about how scientists believed that life as we know it had begun eons ago when a large chunk of Mars broke off and became a meteor that struck Earth, introducing Martian microorganisms: the first life on Earth. In a sense, Blackie had explained, we are all Martians." Strange comfort, isn't it, and yet we need something to gain sustenance from. Friedman turns Shelley on his head, makes a lovely world from an old teardrop. "Above the transparent dome of the pavilion the stars were pinholes in carbon paper."
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life on Mars?,
This review is from: Martian Dawn (Paperback)
Martian Dawn broke into my personal Top Five "Poet's Novels" about here:
"Rinpoche was a great Tibetan Buddhist teacher. He lived in a 4,000-square-foot ranch-style house with an indoor basketball half-court in East Boulder along the thirteenth fairway of the Flatirons Golf Course." The book's charms are all here in miniature--the studied flatness; the social commentary posing as value-neutral information; and the economy of a cartoonist's line that leaves the shading in of irony to you. When poets take to novels, I usually brace for flowery prose and a soggy plot. Friedman though adopts a style clean as ether and characters no deeper than the branded products they carry to throw attention on the geometry of their anomie. Interchangeable couples get run through a plot of mix `n' match relationships that suggest, with dry humor and a light touch, that whether it's in Buddhist meditation centers on Mars or at the bar of the Yale Club, the mind is a terrible Ritz-Carlton to waste.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Kind of blah,
By
This review is from: Martian Dawn (Paperback)
I took a chance on this because of the good blurbs and interesting cover. Plus it was short so I didn't have to make a big commitment.
While the book included a few interesting ideas and nice pieces of writing, nothing happened. I kept waiting for the author to pull everything together and it just didn't happen. Maybe the author was trying to use the tone of the book to communicate the boring and empty lives of the characters. In that sense, he was successful. There's a classic problem in this type of book: how do you write about boring, empty people without the book becoming boring and empty? It's a challenge that the author didn't overcome. Disappointing.
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