Adam & Eve

June 14, 2010
Naslund (Ahab's Wife) delivers a cheesy blend of futuristic thriller, pseudoreligious speculation, and idyllic romance. In 2017, Lucy Bergmann's astrophysicist husband is murdered just before he is to reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life. Now, as the keeper of a copy of his data, Lucy's being stalked by the leaders of a sect called Perpetuity, who intend to destroy any challenge to their fundamentalist beliefs. And when Lucy agrees to transport an ancient scroll that offers an alternate version of the Book of Genesis from Cairo to the Dordogne, she becomes a double target. Lucy pilots a plane (this convenient ability is indicative of the preposterous plot) and crash-lands in Mesopotamia, where she meets a gorgeous, naked man named Adam (an American GI gone a touch nutty) who nurses her back to health in a facsimile of the Garden of Eden. Their chaste but busy domesticity is eventually threatened by the evil Perpetuity crew, and they face even more danger after an escape to France. It's embarrassingly bad in every way, from the dopey conceit of a 21st-century Eden to the paper-thin characters who spout ersatz philosophy and spiritual theorizing while enjoying the cloying clichés of romance fiction.

July 1, 2010
In 2017, Lucy, the much younger wife of famous astrophysicist Thom Bergmann, watches in horror as a grand piano being lowered from a window in Amsterdam slips and kills him. Devastated, Lucy protects the memory stick he entrusted to her, which contains proof of extraterrestrial life. Fast-forward three years to Mesopotamia (Iraq), where a wounded American soldier has barely survived his injuries and is immersed in religious delusions. Adam saves Lucy after the crash of the small plane she was piloting while smuggling an ancient codex, given to her by Pierre, an Arab now living in France. Adam tends to Lucy's burns, and they both restore body and soul in their Eden. Pursued by evil men who fear the knowledge contained in both the memory stick and the codex, Adam and his Eve flee their assailants and seek refuge in France with Pierre and his beautiful daughter, where all four are now in the crosshairs of danger. VERDICTTo describe the elements of this ambitious novel is to sound unhinged, but Naslund ("Ahab's Wife; or, The Star-Gazer" pulls it off. This thriller is rich in brilliant discourses on religion, fanaticism, the meaning of ancient cave art, the speculative future, and love. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ"6/15/10.]—Beth E. Anderson, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2010

The story of the story of Genesis, and a love story reminiscent of Joan Crawford's worst movies are, uh, juxtaposed, in this very earnest sixth novel from the industrious Kentucky author (Abundance, 2006, etc.).

Set in the near future, it begins with the narration of Lucy Bergmann, widowed when her husband Thom, a renowned astrophysicist who had discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life, is brought rudely back to earth, so to speak, when a piano falls from the sky onto him. Inspired to continue Thom's work, Lucy educates herself as needed, accepts numerous invitations to scholarly conventions and whatnot, and happens to be airborne en route to Egypt when engine trouble and the Hand of Fate steer her toward the nubile naked form of wounded American soldier (yes, dear readers, we're still Over There) Adam Black, having awoken--like his biblical namesake--in the Mesopotamian desert, to a new world waiting to be claimed by this transplanted Iowa farm boy. Eventually this Adam, whose ingenuous ingenuity recalls the gnomic nonwisdom of Chauncey Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, and his new Eve leave their garden and end up in France, in flight from Thom's old colleague and enemy Gabriel Plum ("a serpent") and into the orbit of anthropologist and cave-painting aficionado Pierre Saad, whose multicultural pedigree and ethos heighten his interest in The Object (which Hitchcock would have called the MacGuffin) that proves the world's four major religions have a common origin. Traditionalists, needless to say, disagree: hence, this overheated novel's ineffably risible climax. The book groans with faux-biblical encomia to Adam's pristine naturalness (e.g., "And Adam touched himself, till he was satisfied" [the reader likewise groans, but not with pleasure]). Even stagier are its abundant rhetorical questions, such as Pierre's "Are we so different from people who lived eons ago?"

Hmmm...wonder what the Texas State School Board will think of this one?

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