Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Alnilam is, as its dust jacket proclaims, a "novel by the author of Deliverance," the 1970 best seller that launched Dickey out of poetry circles and into the celebrity void. He was good, fast-drying copy. Big and burly as a stereotypical Southern sheriff (a role he played in the movie of Deliverance), he strummed a guitar, partied hard and shot at deer with a bow and arrow. His collection of poems, Buckdancer's Choice, won a 1966 National Book Award, but he was also a member of the warrior class, having flown Black Widow night fighters against the Japanese...
...notion of 50 readers swinging in hammocks is hard to resist. At nearly 700 pages, Alnilam is a book for a long, hot summer. "I've tried to do for the air what Melville did for water," says Dickey with a laugh that deflects the seriousness of his novel. It is a euphonious mystery story set at a U.S. Army Air Corps training base during the 1940s. Flying, in the mechanical as well as transcendental sense, is basic to the action, which is surprisingly abundant for a book that is shaped by poetic impulses rather than plot...
...novel's highly charged atmosphere turns these scrap items into relics. Blind Cahill literally feels his way to the truth about his son. Joel's former instructor breaks regulations and takes him for a dangerous spin that conveys the elemental and unnatural sensation of flight. Cahill also discovers that the lost flyer was the leader of a trainee cult known as Alnilam, named after the central star in the constellation Orion, the hunter. Eventually Joel is revealed as an incipient fascist, a "cool-headed demon," an arrogant manipulator of symbols and, reminiscent of the pseudoscientific romanticism of Nazi Germany...
...This novel is the fifth installment of a burgeoning saga that might be called "The U.S. According to Gore." Vidal's ambitious retelling and revamping of American history began on a modest scale with Washington, D.C. (1967), a novel set in the middle of this century that mixed real and fictional people in a struggle for the nation's soul. Then came Burr (1973), a witty revisionist look at the Founding Fathers, as recorded by Aaron Burr's amanuensis and illegitimate son Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler. In 1876 (1976), an older Schuyler returned home after years of self-imposed exile...
These echoes contribute a great deal to a novel that is stronger on atmosphere than plot. In the beginning, the U.S. has just defeated Spain, gaining sway over the Caribbean and, by way of the Philippines, a foothold in the Pacific. A lot of talk ensues about whether an American empire is a good idea. The speakers include William McKinley, McKinley's Secretary of State John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Adams, William Randolph Hearst and Henry James, who comes onstage briefly to wonder, "How can we, who cannot honestly govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others?" James' point...