Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:19:44 -0500

Review: Grim setting for wacky 'Lamentations of Julius Marantz'

Laurel Maury
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

In the Bible, Jesus had several choices for the person on whom to found his church. He chose neither the mystical genius John, nor Andrew, but Andrew's little brother Peter, the weak man. Scholars have made much of this, noting how the church that was founded on a schlub like the rest of us has outlasted the empires of strong men and geniuses.
Or perhaps Peter got the job because Jesus knew what a pain in the butt geniuses and bigwigs are. Estrin's oddly charming novel, "The Lamentations of Julius Marantz," is about a Jewish physicist who inadvertently brings about a false Rapture. Like Peter, Julius Marantz is a weak man, but a good one. Unfortunately, he's also a genius, and has created an anti-gravity device of deep interest to the men and women who run America. Now the weak-but-good side of Marantz wants to expose them, and he will probably die in the attempt.
Marantz lives in an alternative America, an urban dystopia where Christianity and commercialism are distilled to a poisonous and sticky candy more potent than heroin; it's the weak man's junk food that keeps regular people drugged. In one scene, a pope figure tears bread off a Christ "nailed to a cross painted with corporate logos," while a second pope figures chants, "Take! Eat! Yum yum yum!"
Enter GEKO, the secret quasi-governmental organization that keeps society going. It's run by a group of brilliant and deeply concerned people - the sort who are wonderful at cocktail parties and dangerous in the halls of power. GEKO is concerned about overpopulation and the growing ozone hole. In a flash of brilliance, it decides to, um, plug the latter with the former.
Suddenly, Marantz is on the run from an evil nongovernmental organization because of his machine. Looking for help, our hero hunts down an old girlfriend, Lydia, like him aging and alone. Their love, all the more real for being frustrated, ruined, abandoned and haunted by the specter of a nasty death, is deeply touching. Nice contrast to GEKO's slick omniscience.
Lydia is an ardent Catholic, a pure soul who's dedicated her life to exposing the evils of the world. Unfortunately, she's more or less at the end of her rope and unwilling to help her old boyfriend. Meanwhile, people are suddenly being "raptured" all over the place. Headlines read, "300 Raptured in India, Government Applauds Faithful." Then, "Radical Muslim housewives, in boots and burqas, protest 'They're Only Hindus! The End of the World Is Not at Hand!' " People mill around, waiting to float bodily into heaven.
Marantz is the latest in a long line of literary Jewish smart-asses. Yet being a physicist, he doesn't understand the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: that nature abhors a smart-ass. So despite being flawed but sympathetic, he's doomed to a really bad end. Meanwhile, the polished geniuses he opposes do quite well for themselves.
Ironic dystopian writers swing off track in one of two ways. Either their whacked-out narrative goes places only they can understand or their characters inhabit a world so crass that sincerity becomes too distant to recall, and therefore cannot be mourned - in other words, they live in a fallen world with no vision of a better one. "The Lamentations of Julius Marantz" is worth reading because the ability to mourn remains.
Estrin remembers the reality that vox-pop and dumbed-down Christianity have replaced. As a boy, Marantz was a smarty-pants screw-up, but his neighborhood and his father loved him anyway. The flashbacks to Marantz's boyhood in Brooklyn are touching without being sentimental.
These scenes get how belief and love turn greasepaint into gold - the opposite of Marantz's present, where fakery tries to manufacture love and belief. When Philip Marantz takes 5-year-old Julius on the Cyclone, it's like what real religion is: a scary kind of magic.
Despite GEKO's desire to play evil nanny to society, the truth is that most children, like most people, can survive almost anything except being overprotected. When Julius announces at his bar mitzvah that he's joining the Catholic Church (and considerate boy that he is, he's even brought stones for the congregation to throw!), his dad doesn't save him. Rather, he dashes out in fury to decapitate the gefilte-fish swan.
Buried in Philip Marantz's parental anger is the wisdom to let young Julius face the music alone. Although the book often lacks a certain richness, as though Estrin forgot the spice in the pumpkin pie, and turns into a bit of a nonnarrative mess at the end, the story has grace and heart. Our noble schlub can't save the world, but he can face it.

Laurel Maury is a New York writer.

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 11:23:34 -0400

Marc Estrin Takes on the Rapture in The Lamentations of Julius Marantz
by Ron Jacobs; ZNet, October 12, 2007

I don't know how familiar folks are with them in other parts of the United States, but down here in North Carolina, I've seen the bumperstickers that read "In case of rapture this car will be unmanned" all too often. The funny thing about the sticker though, is that the drivers of the vehicles they appear on seem to be deadly serious. They truly believe that they will be one of the 144,000 that will be bodily lifted into the heavens at any time. I'm not one to lampoon someone else's religious beliefs in public (no matter how ridiculous they may seem), but if there are only 144,000 souls that will experience this end of the world, how can there be so many cars with those bumperstickers on them?

Since the intention of this piece is not to address this and other pressing theological questions but to review the latest fictional work from Marc Estrin, I'll leave the quandary produced by those bumperstickers in the hands of men and women better trained in such matters. It certainly seems to be at least as important as how many angels can actuality fit on a pin-a question that is probably still being debated in some seminary on the planet..

Estrin's novel, titled The Lamentations of Julius Marantz (Unbridled Books, 2007), twists the rapture into a comic conspiracy of the right wing US government and the Sierra Club (among others) designed to rid the government of its leftist and Islamic enemies, end the leak in the ozone, and consolidate the government's right wing political base. It all begins with the misadventures of Julius Marantz, a clubfooted Jewish-American physicist who has invented an anti-gravity device. Unwittingly, he allows the device, known simply as 'the doodad," to fall into the hands of GEKO, a rightwing coalition of corporate lobbyists, Christian religious leaders, military men, and a good portion of the United States government. The intentions of GEKO become all too clear as they begin to use the Doodad to remove their enemies from the face of the earth.

Thus begins Julius' attempts to get the Doodad back while avoiding the GEKO secret police attempting to capture Julius and send him up with the rest of their raptured enemies. Meanwhile, back on earth, the reader is presented with a potentially real rally of bikers high on Jesus. Estrin's manipulation of the language used by the Falwells, Robertsons, Swaggarts and their lesser brethren quietly exposes the vacuum behind the televangelists' revival circus. Besides that, it points out the underlying comedic absurdity of it.

For Julius, who spent his younger years spying on adult life on Coney Island weekends, this newest circus is reminiscent yet less instructive than his boyhood jaunts. He learns nothing new about the fantastic extravagances of human nature. Indeed, he only learns more about those who would prevent those extravagances because of their own lust for money and power. Furthermore, like Estrin's other anti-heroes Marantz looks to love for release from the ugliness he discovers. He goes underground in search of an old lover whom he hopes will join him in his crusade to fight the government and get the Doodad back. When that fails Julius, like Gregor Samsa, Estrin's most famous protagonist from the novel Insect Dreams, ends up giving up his fight against the evil he knows lurks in the hearts of the powerful and decides to seek his release via death.

It's another clever tale told here by Mr. Estrin. Nominally a Jewish novel (whatever the hell that is), it is a novel about the nonsensical manipulations we take in the name of religion. It is also a story bout how those manipulations can and are used against the religious--rarely for their own good. Like the tales of Jonathan Swift, Estrin's satire of modern day America is more than just a joke. It's a warning we might do well to heed.

Reviews: The Lamentations of Julius Marantz