Word: mayer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Mayer uses the plight of the aging comic-book hero to parody most of what characterizes America and everything that makes up New York. Shortly after the novel begins, chaos strikes the bankrupt Metropolis. The unpaid and overworked police force have resigned en masse and looting, rape and murder pervade. Brinkley, watching football, curses his bookie and tries to ignore the city's crisis until the fateful thought strikes him, "Is it a conspiracy?" Needless to say, it is. And Brinkley plunges into a crisis of conscience. Should he leave the repose of his suburban home, his loving wife...
Anyone who has ever read a comic book, watched a rerun of Superman or tuned in same bat-time, same bat-station, knows, despite sweating palms and churning stomach, the superhero always wins. But lingering childhood confidence in the media creation cannot quite assert itself against Superfolks. Mayer is not Alfred Hitchcock or Agatha Christie, and when one turns a page anticipating a crucial revelation and finds instead a new, unrelated chapter, one can cringe and say "Aha. He's trying to build suspense--cheap trick." The simple reason Mayer used moth-eaten tactics is that he can use them...
...Mayer teases his reader in a subtler, more ambiguous way as well. Sandwiched between jibes at Yiddish, first love and Herbert Hoover is an apparently serious statement about American politics, values and mores. But the reader is never quite sure when Mayer crosses the line between humor and conviction. The angels in Heaven bustle about designing portable restrooms, and manna and nectar refreshment concessions for the up-coming gala bimillenium. ("We're expecting millions of tourists," Mary tells Brinkley.) The bumbling corruption of Soviet-American disarmament negotiators and the CIA's school for assassins are cleverly ridiculed, but the caricatures...
...SAME READER who inwardly cheers when the CIA agent confesses at the White House (just in the nick of time) and is rewarded with the "large, white toothy smile" lighting the black president's face feels disappointed and foolish when the actual source of the conspiracy is revealed. Although Mayer jeers at immorality, he ultimately shifts the blame from us, perhaps in pursuit of, perhaps as a jab against happy endings. The conspiratorial evil is not the evil of earthlings. Instead Pxyzsyzygy, that impish elf from the Fifth Dimension, manipulates us and warps our innate goodness...
...reader is almost certain that Mayer is basically writing a comedy but inserting an obligatory, though sincere, political statement. On the other hand, one cannot help but wonder if the righteous reformer reading the book is the ultimate patsy. Maybe Mayer would laugh if he thought someone was actually trying to discover a message between the onslaught of one-liners. Yet it does not really matter. The humor may drag occasionally, particularly during the intergalactic battle scenes. The intentionally hackneyed plot might vanish periodically. But Superfolks, political or apolitical, is still a very funny book. Even Lord Nietzsche would have...