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Lunar attractions
David has always been special, attuned to the dark side of things, pulled toward the disturbing undercurrents beneath the slick surface of American life. As a whimsical, misunderstood boy growing up in the Florida backwoods, he maps out a reality less hostile than the snapping gators and insensitive school teachers of his rural home. As an adolescent he gets a shocking introduction to sensuality, a sexual initiation in stark contrast to the gentle first-kiss fantasies of teenaged dreams. Lunar Attractions brilliantly captures the manic nature of our times.
- GenresFiction
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
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About the author
Clark Blaise
42 books15 followersClark Blaise, OC (born 10 April 1940) is a Canadian author.
Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group.
In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University".
Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group.
In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University".
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 7, 2021
When a gun is shown in a movie the rule is that it gets fired by the third act. While there are no guns in this novel there are numerous sharp pieces of plot that are laid like traps, but unfortunately never go off. Much of progressive literature is about breaking rules, but this is a plot driven novel and could have been strung together better. Still a hidden gem. The good parts were very good. A great book to discuss with others.
July 28, 2015
I suppose this is how we grow up: by learning that even implacable principles are in contention. One day the world is fixed forever, without cause, effect, or mitigation. We respond naïvely and mythically: clusters of stars tell obvious stories (only a cynic could doubt the design in Orion's Belt); seasons arrive and depart by grace alone; disease and death are bestowed as punishments. Miniature people inhabit our radios, and everything in the world, living and dead, possesses a soul. Then suddenly the spontaneity deserts us. We embrace new authorities – books and teachers, movies and friends – we become transmitters. We learn of light-years and vacuum tubes, sound waves and psychology. We push back the borders of permissible innocence.
Lunar Attractions is the story of David Greenwood – a tubby, dreamy, out-of-place child – and in several short story-like episodes, we watch him grow into a tubby, dreamy, out-of-place adolescent. David spends his early years in central Florida – nowhere near the ocean and orange groves; this is swamps and intestinal worms and estivating mudfish lurking beneath the sandy soil – where his Yankee parents (that's his word, although I'm skeptical about it as a descriptor for a European Mom and a French Canadian Dad) are too old and too foreign to secure David's place in society. Tormented by his white trash teacher for his early reading skills and his left-handedness, David retreats into private study, where he fills his head with facts and trivia (later dismissed as “wise-idiocy” by a white trash psychologist.) With a doting mother and a pugnacious father, David is pulled in opposing directions, never quite fitting in anywhere.
David is saved by a move to the “nearly North” of Ohio when he reached high school, where he finds a group of other cerebral and oddball kids to hang out with. This is apparently the part of the book for which Lunar Attractions is most famous. I was led to this title by this article about a publishing company that has rereleased underappreciated Canadian books; an article in which Barbara Kay says that “Lunar Attractions is superb (and, by the way, contains the most aesthetically deft explicit sex scene I have ever read).” I really thought that was a parenthetical comment until I read on the back of the book this blurb from The National Review : “The most ferocious and astonishing scene of adolescent sexual first contact ever written: in English: in fiction.” While this scene is astonishing, as well as pivotal for David's character, it likely had more impact when this book was first released in 1980.
Lunar Attractions reads like a Saul Bellow or Mordecai Richler novel: a fairly detached examination of the post-WWII Montreal-Jewish-male-now-living-outside-Canada experience; rich with the dirty underbelly of the American Dream and its inaccessibility for those who aren't quite American enough. Author Clark Blaise is a Canadian-American and this book isn't quite Can-con, although I understand that he was considered an important Canadian voice when it was written (before he decamped for the States for good). As a proud Canadian, I laughed at David's reaction to discovering that he had dual Canadian and American citizenship as well:
The idea had thrilled me, like learning I'd been adopted or had a sister somewhere. And the fact that I was something unplaceable, Canadian, and not something more easily identifiable had appealed powerfully to me. No one knew what it meant. Something very close but still different; the essence of mystery. I felt like a spy, a shadow, someone with a secret identity.
David's constant scrutiny of his identity and his feelings of dislocation make for a very masculine story, and like Herzog or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, I could appreciate the art of what was written without really being able to identify with the story itself (and conversely, I would understand if men didn't get as much out of Marian Engel's Bear as I did). Four stars for the art of this, and the final scene:
The music came back louder than ever and I found myself clutching the same door frame for support until the spasms passed and then I ran far from the parked cars to lie in the grass under the sun and to wait for the god to invade my blood.
February 13, 2023
A little while back I got it in my head to specifically seek out books by graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a prestigious writing program; the few graduates I’ve run across organically have all been extraordinary writers and I felt this was a good pool to draw from to read books that I hoped would be great. I know Clark Blaise was one of the authors I found from this search and that is why I added LUNAR ATTRACTIONS to my Want to Reads but I don’t recall what specifically about this title drew me in. Although there are not many ratings for the book on Goodreads (just 24), they seem to almost all be either 5-stars or 3-stars and I think maybe that seeming divisiveness spoke to me.
The book is a fictional memoir of sorts of a boy named David Greenwood. Incidentally the name David called to mind Hanya Yanigahara’s TO PARADISE for me (not just the name: the characters seem similar in a lot of ways) and the surname Greenwood unsurprisingly called to mind Michael Christie’s GREENWOOD.
Nowadays we might call this a YA book simply because its protagonist is a child or youth throughout the entirety of the narrative. He begins the book living in Florida and describes his life there and his relationship with his parents; later they move to a medium-sized city he calls Palestra, and form there it becomes about his relationship with his peers, with girls, and how he gets swept up in a murder investigation?? 😳 Uh… yeah, so that happens. In fact, though, that part of the book feels ridiculous and in my view is a stain on what was otherwise a decent, if not especially thrilling slice-of-life story about a young boy “coming of age”, by which I mean finding his own personality, experiencing a bit of gender dysphoria and questioning his sexuality, and seeing his parents in new ways as he ages. The book veers into the absurd with the whole murder subplot, however, and is lesser for it.
Generally, though, my feeling throughout the book was that the parts are better than the whole. I did note several gorgeously written or relatable passages which made me think, yep, this is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad. One moment came early on when David speaks of being reprimanded for writing with his left hand on his first day in school and then later again for announcing that the children drawn in their Dick & Jane-like primers are just a collection of dots. David goes on to say: “But you see, I could have said, if they are only dots, who’s to say that we’re not, too? Why, I wanted to know but never asked, did no one else see these things? Or—seeing them—not speak up? What was the secret of not caring? Right-handedness?” David concludes that his brain works in ways different from his peers. He can’t stop wondering why, can’t stop his imagination from spinning wildly out of control. “Stars burned and buzzards wheeled under the ceiling of my scalp,” Blaise writes. Lovely, poetic.
Then there’s the moments where Blaise’s descriptions really bring out the scene in a visceral way. Another fairly early sequence involves David describing his father’s physique in detail. He says, “I used to admire the rippling of my father’s forearm muscles—like piano wires responding to the idlest touch—as he lightly tapped a single finger.” That comparison to piano wires is really evocative. Another moment comes later when his father buys him boxing gloves and spars with him. His mother gets upset, asserting that David is too sensitive and fragile to bear the violence. David’s father slaps his mother, then walks out of the house. His mother unties and removes his gloves, and in spite of the seriousness of the surrounding events, David’s thoughts are focused inward: “When she took them off, my hands were cool with sweat, numb and light, wondrously separate from my body.” I’ve never felt this exactly but I compared it to the feeling of removing roller skates or ice skates after having worn them for some time… like you’re still not quite on the ground.
As I said, the book follows David as he ages and learns, at first following others who seem more cultured or learned than him, and then later finding his own voice. Probably the high point of the book comes when David gets a do-over at explaining why a tableau at the natural history museum appeals to him despite its hokiness. Incidentally, that tableau—of a Bedouin and his camel being attacked by a desert lion—and the way the book returned to it, called to mind Richard Powers’ THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE. So many connections bubbling in my mind! Anyway, as David loses some of the naivete of his younger days, he laments that as children our worlds are ones in which miniature people inhabit our radios, for instance, but as we age “[w]e learn of light-years and vacuum tubes, sound waves and psychology. We push back the borders of permissible innocence.”
There’s just a couple of other things I want to share before I wrap this up. Again, the murder subplot is very stupid and involves a graphic sexual encounter which I gather was shocking at the time the book was published (1979) but which now is shocking less for its content than for the age of the characters involved. Anyway, if there is one saving grace to that whole episode, which goes on far longer than it has any right to, it’s that it ends with David choosing not to go forward to the police with information he has which may help them solve the case. His reasoning is this: “I knew I was on the side of fear, nightmare and of all the unanswered things. I was on the side of the caterpillars and not the butterflies, the whippoorwills and not the eagles.” Again, that’s beautifully stated and poetic, without being self-indulgent like many actual poems are.
Finally, as an older teen David takes a creative writing class. His teacher in the class talks about artists’ ability to “pluck significance from chaos”, but warns that the great problem with artists is that they “don’t keep nuance and nature distinct.” When a puddle of water forms drips from somebody’s clothing in real life, it only means that they’ve been out in the rain; when the same happens in a story, it is a metaphor, a symbol—it has an underlayer of meaning. “Import raw nature into a story or poem and you’ve only ruined a story,” his teacher says, but then cautions, “Import nuance into real life and you’ll go mad. There’ll suddenly be too much significance everywhere, a message in everything. Hamlet’s disease.” I can definitely relate with that problem, of seeing metaphors and symbols in real life and letting it consume me. Again: relatable and very well-put.
Again, though I’ve been drawing attention to my favorite parts of the book, the majority of it is pretty low-key. That makes it hard to feel a great sense of affection for it, and as I’ve expressed there are some elements I felt did not work even as I found some elements did live up to my high expectations. In the end, I’ve split the difference here at 3 stars. It wasn’t bad, but definitely feels like it had the capacity to be better.
The book is a fictional memoir of sorts of a boy named David Greenwood. Incidentally the name David called to mind Hanya Yanigahara’s TO PARADISE for me (not just the name: the characters seem similar in a lot of ways) and the surname Greenwood unsurprisingly called to mind Michael Christie’s GREENWOOD.
Nowadays we might call this a YA book simply because its protagonist is a child or youth throughout the entirety of the narrative. He begins the book living in Florida and describes his life there and his relationship with his parents; later they move to a medium-sized city he calls Palestra, and form there it becomes about his relationship with his peers, with girls, and how he gets swept up in a murder investigation?? 😳 Uh… yeah, so that happens. In fact, though, that part of the book feels ridiculous and in my view is a stain on what was otherwise a decent, if not especially thrilling slice-of-life story about a young boy “coming of age”, by which I mean finding his own personality, experiencing a bit of gender dysphoria and questioning his sexuality, and seeing his parents in new ways as he ages. The book veers into the absurd with the whole murder subplot, however, and is lesser for it.
Generally, though, my feeling throughout the book was that the parts are better than the whole. I did note several gorgeously written or relatable passages which made me think, yep, this is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad. One moment came early on when David speaks of being reprimanded for writing with his left hand on his first day in school and then later again for announcing that the children drawn in their Dick & Jane-like primers are just a collection of dots. David goes on to say: “But you see, I could have said, if they are only dots, who’s to say that we’re not, too? Why, I wanted to know but never asked, did no one else see these things? Or—seeing them—not speak up? What was the secret of not caring? Right-handedness?” David concludes that his brain works in ways different from his peers. He can’t stop wondering why, can’t stop his imagination from spinning wildly out of control. “Stars burned and buzzards wheeled under the ceiling of my scalp,” Blaise writes. Lovely, poetic.
Then there’s the moments where Blaise’s descriptions really bring out the scene in a visceral way. Another fairly early sequence involves David describing his father’s physique in detail. He says, “I used to admire the rippling of my father’s forearm muscles—like piano wires responding to the idlest touch—as he lightly tapped a single finger.” That comparison to piano wires is really evocative. Another moment comes later when his father buys him boxing gloves and spars with him. His mother gets upset, asserting that David is too sensitive and fragile to bear the violence. David’s father slaps his mother, then walks out of the house. His mother unties and removes his gloves, and in spite of the seriousness of the surrounding events, David’s thoughts are focused inward: “When she took them off, my hands were cool with sweat, numb and light, wondrously separate from my body.” I’ve never felt this exactly but I compared it to the feeling of removing roller skates or ice skates after having worn them for some time… like you’re still not quite on the ground.
As I said, the book follows David as he ages and learns, at first following others who seem more cultured or learned than him, and then later finding his own voice. Probably the high point of the book comes when David gets a do-over at explaining why a tableau at the natural history museum appeals to him despite its hokiness. Incidentally, that tableau—of a Bedouin and his camel being attacked by a desert lion—and the way the book returned to it, called to mind Richard Powers’ THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE. So many connections bubbling in my mind! Anyway, as David loses some of the naivete of his younger days, he laments that as children our worlds are ones in which miniature people inhabit our radios, for instance, but as we age “[w]e learn of light-years and vacuum tubes, sound waves and psychology. We push back the borders of permissible innocence.”
There’s just a couple of other things I want to share before I wrap this up. Again, the murder subplot is very stupid and involves a graphic sexual encounter which I gather was shocking at the time the book was published (1979) but which now is shocking less for its content than for the age of the characters involved. Anyway, if there is one saving grace to that whole episode, which goes on far longer than it has any right to, it’s that it ends with David choosing not to go forward to the police with information he has which may help them solve the case. His reasoning is this: “I knew I was on the side of fear, nightmare and of all the unanswered things. I was on the side of the caterpillars and not the butterflies, the whippoorwills and not the eagles.” Again, that’s beautifully stated and poetic, without being self-indulgent like many actual poems are.
Finally, as an older teen David takes a creative writing class. His teacher in the class talks about artists’ ability to “pluck significance from chaos”, but warns that the great problem with artists is that they “don’t keep nuance and nature distinct.” When a puddle of water forms drips from somebody’s clothing in real life, it only means that they’ve been out in the rain; when the same happens in a story, it is a metaphor, a symbol—it has an underlayer of meaning. “Import raw nature into a story or poem and you’ve only ruined a story,” his teacher says, but then cautions, “Import nuance into real life and you’ll go mad. There’ll suddenly be too much significance everywhere, a message in everything. Hamlet’s disease.” I can definitely relate with that problem, of seeing metaphors and symbols in real life and letting it consume me. Again: relatable and very well-put.
Again, though I’ve been drawing attention to my favorite parts of the book, the majority of it is pretty low-key. That makes it hard to feel a great sense of affection for it, and as I’ve expressed there are some elements I felt did not work even as I found some elements did live up to my high expectations. In the end, I’ve split the difference here at 3 stars. It wasn’t bad, but definitely feels like it had the capacity to be better.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews