Reaching for
the starsby Robert Gillespie
"There was no form of love that did not lead to bedlam," thinks Isabelle Smuggs, singling out the loony power that propels Associate Professor of English James Finney Boylan's comic novel The Constellations (Random House, $22). Isabelle (a sculptor whose work people find revolting) remembers one of the countless swains who have abandoned her: "Samuel said he loved the person he was when he was with her but this person was not himself and so in order to go back to being himself they had to break up even though he liked the person who was not himself better than the person who he actually was."
"She'll adjust," reflects Isabelle's father, Professor Quentin Smuggs, recently relieved of his seminar called Reinventing Beinghood. "This whole world is just a process of adjusting."
Adjusting to the comic world of The Constellations means confronting bedlam from without and within and coping with one screwy complication or disaster after another. Events take place in and near Centralia, Pa., which has become virtually a ghost town since the local coal mines began to smoulder with subterranean fire in 1962. Headed by Phoebe Harrison, a high school "heavy metal chick" whose mother abandoned her eight years earlier, the cast includes Phoebe's father, mother and stepmother, her friends and her sister's friends, and neighbors, acquaintances and assorted strangers like the Smuggses. They all live lives of noisy desperation-hoping to be one of the group, to go to Harvard, to make a living, to make it big, to be loved.
Whether trying to control somebody else, trying to improve their circumstances or trying actually to break a pattern and behave themselves better, the characters bounce like pinballs off one another's obstructive self-absorption. The novel bustles and bristles with manic verve as the characters zoom about in a cement mixer and a 1975 Dodge Swinger that uses Crisco for motor oil. Sentences hurtle off on tangents through the distractions of a hundred details.
"Out of control!" exclaims Phoebe's high school friend Duard, discovering that his pants are on fire. Adjustments to this world, which naturally create more complications, are very funny. When 15-year-old Phoebe wonders if anybody likes her, the adjustments are painful, too.
"People liked you better the less you looked and acted like yourself," Phoebe thinks, wistfully alone, wanting only to fit in. She hopes that a haircut and dye job will transform her from "the stranger with the big, feathered, jet black hair" to "a little honey blond girl with a short bob." "Jeez, Phoebe thought, thinking about this person, this blond shy stranger. I hope she likes me."
Some of the novel's best moments belong to Duard, who asks himself questions as a way of communicating: "Does that sound like fun? I don't know. Am I still nervous? A little." Even real understanding can occur in a world where characters attend to one another only obsessively or in self-interest. Duard, on the phone with Phoebe, says, "Do I miss you?" "I miss you too, Duard," Phoebe replies.
Visual humor includes the tour de force shampoo and haircut scene and a berserk vacuum cleaner that confounds the inept salesperson. The classic adulterous spouse also is played for laughs as he gets nabbed redhanded at the scene of the crime, his own naked body the smoking gun that sends him running for home chased by a cow.
"I wanted to write a book that was both funny and more extreme," Boylan said recently, referring to his first novel, The Planets, "and that had an even more serious heart." Interested in what he calls "that edge between what's funny and what's grotesque," Boylan compares Phoebe's touching meeting in The Constellations with her long-lost mother to a Harpo Marx scene in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. "Suddenly the movie gets serious," he said. "This guy is playing classical harp in the middle of farce."
Astrology, explaining how heavenly bodies affect the conduct of human affairs, provides epigraphs to each of the novel's chapters, but Boylan says the chapter headings provide only "a nice superficial superstructure to what happens. There's no profound Joycean secret, no secret code to crack. It's just fun to find in human action some sort of pattern."
Events never overwhelm Boylan's characters, who prove that flexibility, adaptability and resilience, in the comic world at least, may lead to a temporary breakout from self-destructive patterns and even to a measure of happiness. Bumping together in the madcap darkness of a pulsing, two-story life-like replica of the human heart and maneuvered back to the Harrison family home in smouldering Centralia, Boylan's characters play out the "serious heart" of this novel.
Isabelle Smuggs, the sculptor whose work makes people sick, "wished that she had had the heart to be a little less original in her art and a little more generous." For his part, Boylan has written a funny book that is original and generous both. The Constellations deserves to have everybody asking for more.
Elizabeth Leonard
Assistant Professor of History
Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War
Norton Press
Yankee Women explores the barriers and discrimination women overcame during the Civil War to serve their country. Focusing on the lives of three women, Sophronia Bucklin, Annie Wittenmyer, and Mary Walker, Leonard reveals the hardships they faced alongside Union soldiers. Bucklin was a nurse who worked in frontline hospitals. Wittenmyer was a prolific organizer of charitable activities that supplied goods for Union troops, established orphanages for children of Union soldiers, and operated kitchens for wounded men. Walker was a feminist who overcame several injustices, including imprisonment as a spy, to become the only woman to serve as a doctor for the Union forces. Leonard examines how the Civil War created new opportunities for women who had been confined to purely domestic roles previously.
James Roger Fleming
Assistant Professor and Director of Science Technology Studies
and Henry A. Gemery
Pugh Family Professor of Economics
Science, Technology, and the Environment: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
The University of Akron Press
Professors Fleming and Gemery have edited a collection of essays that discuss scientific and humanistic approaches to environmental problems. Contributors include Nobel prize-winning physicist Norman F. Ramsey, MIT Professor of History Leo Marx, and scholars from Cornell, Penn State and UCLA. Other authors include international authorities representing the World Bank, the United States Federal Trade Commission, an Israeli Science Institute, SEATEC International, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Four Colby College faculty-Associate Professor of Chemistry Whitney King, Associate Professor of Biology Frank Fekete, Associate Professor of Geology Paul Doss, and Mitchell Family Professor of Economics Tom Tietenberg-also contributed to the book.
The essays touch on a wide range of environmental issues, including how chaos theory can be applied to understand nature and concerns about dumping toxic waste in minority neighborhoods.
The book suggests that because the environment involves a complex mixing of relationships, a multidisciplinary approach is necessary to resolve tensions between technological advancement and environmental quality.
Robert B. Parker '54
All Our Yesterdays
Delacorte Press
The author of the acclaimed Spenser novel series has written a family saga about an Irish immigrant turned Boston policeman. The book traces the lives of three generations of Sheridans beginning with Conn Sheridan, whose work as a policeman in Boston's urban underworld parallels his introduction to the city's powerful and wealthy. Against this backdrop, Parker follows the Sheridan saga through Conn's son, Gus, a homicide detective, and his son, Chris. When Gus uncovers a connection between a child killer and an Irish-American gang war, the circle that began with his father's IRA activities begin to close. Chris, a special prosecutor, begins an investigation of his own that uncovers the truth about his family's past and his heritage.
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