Gene
Hayworthreviews
Van Allen's Ecstasy
by
Jim Tushinski
| Van
Allen's Ecstasy by Jim Tushinski Harrington Park Press ISBN 1-56023-455-5. 2004 164 p. The revelations in Van Allen's Ecstasy unfold gradually for both the reader and the narrator, a 29-year-old psychiatric patient named Michael. At the beginning of the novel Michael has just been released into his mother's care. He cannot remember why he was institutionalized, but his doctor tells him that he suffered a breakdown during one of his father’s concerts. His frustration at his inability to remember is balanced precariously against his lack of will to act. Michael's days are filled with simple activities like jogging in place, an excellent metaphor for the state in which he finds himself. He listens to music, takes his medication, looks at photographs, wanders aimlessly around the house watching his mother at her work In the first section of the novel, languor, Tushinski introduces the characters and establishes Michael's inability to remember them. Michael is the youngest child in a family of accomplished individuals; his father is a world-renowned pianist, his mother is a painter, his oldest sister Sara is an admired newspaper columnist, and his brother Karl is an affluent lawyer. Michael is the only one among them what has not been able to find success -- he has attempted piano, photography, acting, and he has written in novel, but none of these attempts produce results. Tushinski's language is eloquent and convincing: The text shimmers with light and color as Michael observes the objects around him in his pursuit of memory, and the reader is quickly drawn into a world where nothing is certain. Tushinski creates a vivid portrait of Marta, Michael's mother, and her frustration at her inability to help her son. Her feelings are both tender and harsh---her relationship with her son has never been an easy one and clues to their relationship are revealed in their interactions. Michael's Dr. gives him an assignment: ask his family three questions. The concept is simple, to see if Michael can retain the information he learns from the answers. Two of the questions Michael chooses are simple. The first is, "How old are you?" The second one is more challenging: "How do we get along?" But it is his third question that has the potential for the greatest revelation. Michael wants to ask, "Do we share a secret?" And there are several secrets at the heart of the novel. Michael's mother describes her son as angry, but we do not know why. We learn that he has a perverse attraction to his brother, but we do not know if he has acted on it. One person outside the family contacts Michael in a series of phone calls, but though we learn his name is Paul and he wants to bring Micahel "home," Michael cannot remember him. Periodically Michael refers to another, equally mysterious companion named Sasha. In the second part of the novel, yearning, we learn some of the answers to Michael's questions. Returning to the apartment he shared with his lover Paul before his breakdown, Michael discovers traces of his former life, including the journal he kept preceding his hospitalization. In its pages, he learns the events leading to his breakdown. The journal reveals that all of his life, Michael has yearned to express his creativity, that he has hoped to please his parents and his siblings by displaying some sign of great talent. Michael also comes to believe that his parents' talents are over-rated. At his mother's art opening his thinks of her paintings as "comic book versions of the real thing." His father plays music without any understanding or feeling for what has gone into its composition, especially the composer Scriabin, whose Piano Sonata No. 5 is on the upcoming concert program. "Sasha," we learn, is Michael's vision of the composer, who begins to haunt him and send him mysterious messages about how to live his life. It is Scriabin's poem "Ecstasy" on which the title of the novel is based. Van Allen's Ecstasy is the story of Michael's journey to reclaim his former life. As he pieces together the events, Michael uncovers unhappiness and disappointment, and begins to act out those old events again. Those readers who require a neat ending may be disappointed in Van Allen's Ecstasy, but it is important to remember that mental illness seldom has an orderly resolution. Tushinski has created a compassionate, engaging portrait of a man on a quest for self-understanding, and readers who are willing to travel with him will find it a worthwhile journey. |
Reviewer's Bio
Gene Hayworth grew up in North Carolina and attended undergraduate school at UNC-Greensboro. He worked for 10 years as a layout artist, technical writer, computer specialist and training instructor before returning to school at the University of Rochester, where he received a Masters degree in English with a concentration in creative writing, and an MLS from Syracuse University. He moved to Colorado in 1995 and worked at CARL Corporation for several years, and in the summer of 1999 he worked for CARL in Singapore, which resulted in the publication of an article about his experiences titled "Singapore Libraries Usher in a New Era," in Computers in Libraries, 20:6 (Nov./Dec. 2000). He is an avid reader and has written several book reviews for Colorado Libraries. In February 2003 prepared an exhibit at the Fales Library, NYU, on the Gay American novelist and playwright Coleman Dowell. His critical study of Dowell appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall, 2002. Currently he works as a reference librarian for the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries. 
GeneTo find out more about writer Jim Tushinski, please visit his website. |