Customer Reviews

Martian Dawn

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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."

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.

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.