Luminarium (Soho Press, August 2011) is the second novel by Alex Shakar (excerpt here). It’s 2006 in New York City. Fred Brounians’s twin brother George lies in a coma in a hospital. His younger brother Sam is trying to keep their internet startup afloat. Fred’s mother is attempting to help George through the use of a Reiki group. And Fred’s father, a frustrated actor, spends his days either high or performing as a clown at children’s birthday parties.
Fred has lost his way in the months since George slipped into a coma. His fiance has dumped him, and he lives at home with his parents. He has abandoned his job at the company he co-founded, spending his days at the hospital with George instead. He’s adrift, reading physics journal articles and wandering the streets of New York in a vain search for the thread that links all of these terrible events together in a web of meaning.
He sees a recruiting notice for an NYU study run by the Department of Neural Science. The study attempts to replicate the feeling of well-being associated with “spiritual awakening”, and it also pays $50 a session. Fred, down to his last dollars, is attracted on both counts, and when he meets Mira, the good looking grad student running the study, a few bucks in exchange for wearing a helmet that delivers complex electromagnetic impulses and doing some visualization exercises seems like a bargain. At first Fred is confused about the experiment (how can he be tricked into having spiritual awareness if he knows in advance it’s just science?), but as Mira explains, “we believe that the emotional power of the experiences and their rational explanations will counterbalance each other. And that over time, you’ll learn to weave both into a larger tapestry”. She concludes, “I like to think of it as faith without ignorance.”
At the same time, sitting in the hospital cafeteria, Fred receives a strange email that appears to be from George with the message “help, avatara”. Fred looks it up, and discovers that avatara is a Sanskrit word for “descent”, and that avataras are incarnations of Hindu gods: “Wherever there was imbalance, injustice, or discord, they would appear to set things right.” Is this George speaking to Fred from his comatose mind? Is it some “bored, random hit squad of listserv dweebs, out to make his life hell?” The meaning of the emails is a question that persists throughout the novel, and Fred turns not just to Hinduism but to virtual Christian worlds (“Christworld”, a mega church in Florida, offers a Creation video online) to find answers.
Luminarium takes us back to the dot com bubble of the 1990s. George’s initial idea for a multiuser object-oriented system (this was before the advent of Second Life) was a place where real physics would obtain in fantastical virtual worlds. But implementing it took them so long, that after 9/11, when the economy of the war on terror made their simulation valuable to Armation, a part of the “Military-Entertainment Complex”, they sold out. Unfolding throughout the novel is a make or break scheduled run through of an attack on New York City.
George hoped that the “avatars’ immaterial nature could rub off on players over time, temper their baser desires, coax their mindsets up the pyramid steps of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from physiological and safety needs all the way up to beauty, truth, self-actualization.” George refers to the game, the virtual world, which he names Urth, as a training ground for the “postmaterial life” everyone will enjoy one day.
Luminarium spends much of its time in spaces that are “nothing unreal exactly, but not exactly fake, either”. Fred is in the helmet in the NYU lab, wandering New York city in a daze, in an Urth simulation, drunk, dreaming, in a Reiki inspired trance. The writing for these moments brings the reader into a seemingly impossible headspace. Near the end, the author manages to follow around a protagonist who doesn’t exist and feels himself not to exist. A thinkerless thought, a Cartesian impossibility.
Yes, despite this sense of real unreality, Luminarium is firmly anchored in place and time. It matters profoundly that this book is set in New York City, five years after 9/11. The events of 9/11 and its aftermath are constituent parts of the shared experience of every character, despite the fact that they each have their own way of living that shared experience. It’s a cliche, but the city is another character here, and not just New York, but Orlando where some of the funniest events of the book take place. That Armation’s headquarters are in Orlando is almost too perfect. It’s the land of the unreal made to appear real.
As I’ve described it so far, Luminarium looks like story about a modern man at loose ends seeking spiritual renewal any place he can: in Hinduism, Christianity, neuroscience, the internet. This is true. And it might have been enough if all the novel did was illustrate the way that our spiritual lives interwine with new technologies. But I was surprised at how attached I became to Fred and his family. Fred is, in some ways, like any postmodern middle class male protagonist, too smart for his own good, equal parts self-pity and wry self-loathing. He gets himself into some pretty ridiculous situations, and there are several moments of laugh out loud humor.
This is not a novel of ideas, but a novel of ideas and a novel about recognizably material human life, which insists on their complex, unbreakable connection. Perhaps the best example is the surprisingly moving relationship that develops between Mira and Fred. Another example is Fred’s tender ministrations to George:
He stayed with his brother for a while, doing the usual, massaging George’s hands and feet to aid blood flow, smoothing he sheets to prevent wrinkles form chafing his skin and giving him lesions, holding up one end of a one-eneded conversation, asking him what the deal was, joking that the next time he should have the courtesy to write more than a subject line. Fred tried to keep it light around George, when he could. he wanted the world to seem like a place his brother might care to revisit.
Although I would not exactly say Luminarium is a bioethical novel, the way the central characters revolve around a family member clinging to biological life encourages questions about the difference between life and death, and the way our society negotiates that line.
This is a long book, and a rich book, and at times I felt the amount of detail, both at the level of plot and description, was too much. I did find myself putting it aside and picking it back up, because reading, at times, felt like work. I think it could have been tighter and less dense without losing impact. The number of different perspectives on reality presented meant that not all of them could be explored fully, although when I felt cheated by that, I reminded myself that this is really Fred’s story, and if he had gone far enough in one direction, it had to be far enough for the reader as well.
I received this novel free from the publisher via Net Galley in exchange for writing a review.