This from the Huntington News (W. Va.), July 30. Thanks, David Kinchen.
‘Night of the Comet’: Coming of Age, Midlife Crises Come Together During 1973 Comet Watch
Monday, July 29, 2013 – 23:03
REVIEWED BY DAVID M. KINCHEN
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” — Henry David Thoreau, “Walden & Civil Disobedience”
I don’t know why George Bishop’s books — including his latest novel “The Night of the Comet” (Ballantine Books, 336 pages, $25.00) — don’t seem to make any bestseller lists I’m familiar with. His debut short novel, “Letter to My Daughter” (see my review below) was outstanding and “Comet” combines the best writing I’ve seen in a long time of coming of age, midlife crises and the “quiet” — or not so quiet — desperation that Thoreau wrote of. Bishop’s prose is good writing, serious but liberally seasoned with a sense of humor. He’s a Louisiana native and they know seasoning in the state!
Maybe it’s because Bishop’s books are often classified as “literary” — the bookstore kiss of death. Both of Bishop’s novels could be called literary, but they’re very accessible, too — the best of both worlds.
I think most people can identify with Alan Broussard Sr.; his 14-year-old son Alan Jr., AKA Junior; his 17-year-old daughter Megan; his wife, Lydia; the Martellos: Frank, Barbara and Gabriella; Junior’s best friend Pete and his dad, owner of the Conoco station — the whole galaxy of characters in this wonderful book. If you’re not like these people, chances are you know someone like Alan Sr., the bespectacled uber-geek high school teacher who rides his bike to school, or the wannabe hippie rebellious daughter Megan.
The novel is narrated by the almost-40-year-old Alan Jr., now living in Baton Rouge, LA in the year 2000. It’s a look back at a year when Comet Kohoutek — a comet, perhaps infected with Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” — ended up disappointing almost everybody. The comet was discovered in March 1973 by Dr. Lobos Kohoutek, a Czech astronomer working at the Hamburg, Germany Observatory (comets are named after their discoverers), and was expected to be at its greatest viewing around Christmastime or in early January 1974 in Terrebonne, Louisiana, the setting of the novel.
(You won’t find it on the road map: There’s a Terrebonne parish, but no town of that name; other towns mentioned in the novel, Napoleonville and Thibodaux, are real places, as, of course are Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where the young Lydia spoke briefly to actress Ava Gardner, in town to film a movie. The film is not identified in the novel, but it’s a 1951 release, “My Forbidden Past,” starring Gardner, Robert Mitchum and Melvyn Douglas.
(More from a 2005 article on Kohoutek and comet research: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/multimedia/images/2005/comets1_prt.htm. The photo of Kohoutek in that article looks pretty impressive to me!)
Alan Sr. is a science teacher in Terrebonne, Louisiana in 1973. He personifies Thoreau’s famous saying: a scientist manqué, teaching science to kids who would rather be doing something else, anything else. In 1973, he’s using the coming of Comet Kohoutek to try to ignite an interest in science to his students.
Lydia Broussard, who met Alan when he arrived in Terrebonne to teach science and she was a teen-age clerk in the drugstore, is just as frustrated as her husband. She’s attracted to the Martellos and is envious of their lifestyle, with her basic Rambler sedan a pale shadow of their Cadillac. The culmination of this fascination is a Comet Party in the Martello home, organized by Lydia and Barbara, to raise money for the cash-starved science laboratories at the high school.
For his fourteenth birthday, Alan Broussard, Jr., receives an expensive Celestron telescope from his father, a gift Alan Sr. hopes will inspire his son to love the stars as much as he does. Instead, Junior, as everybody calls him, uses the high-powered scope to spy on his pretty new neighbor, Gabriella Martello, a high school classmate who’s just moved into a big house in the exclusive subdivision across the bayou. She’s the daughter of Frank, an oil company executive and his social-climbing wife Barbara, who resents being stuck in plain-as-dirt Terrebonne.
At the beginning of the novel there’s a teaser, explained at the end. Everything is not what it seems in the novel — like life itself. “The Night of the Comet” is about disappointment, but it’s at heart an optimistic book that readers looking for something meatier than the latest formulaic best-seller will embrace. I hope so.
A personal note: I was kind of a geek myself in high school in the mid 1950s, playing trombone (all trombone players are geeks at heart!) and tuba in the concert and marching bands and orchestra, setting up audio-visual equipment for ham-handed teachers as a member of the Projectionist Club, being a socially inept bookworm like Junior. There was no problem injecting myself into the life of Terrebonne (“Good Earth” in French) set two decades after I began high school and feeling right at home.