Nine Shiny Objects

May 1, 2020
An impressive debut novel tells a wide-ranging story of mysterious connections among vividly rendered characters in 20th-century America. This novel's nine chapters stretch across four decades at intervals of five years. Each has a different main character, and their settings crisscross the country. The book opens in 1947 with Oliver Danville, a "washed-up stage actor" and pool shark, who witnesses a friend's murder and decides to change his life. When he reads a newspaper story about a military pilot who saw a group of UFOs, the "shiny objects" of the title, he's galvanized by a vision of a better world. After a chance meeting with a farm family, Oliver takes off, farmer and wife in tow, for the West. Five years later, Oliver, now called the Tzadi Sophit, is the leader of a California cult that aims to create a multiracial utopia. In 1957, he and his followers move across the country into a newly built town adjacent to a Long Island suburb and are violently attacked by some of their neighbors. The echoes of that terrible night shape the main characters in the rest of the chapters: a young black man embarking on an intellectual life in Harlem, a salesman in Florida who makes a wild career change, a woman who hosts a conspiracy-theory radio show in Phoenix, another woman whose husband was the ringleader of the attack, a teenage girl whose grandparents and parents were targets of the attack, and finally an old man, the son of Oliver's first followers, still on their farm and haunted by the ghost of his brother. Several characters recur, including Max Felt, who was a boy during the attack and grows up to be a rock star and something of a cult leader himself. Max and Oliver remain mysterious characters whose thoughts the reader has little access to, and the plot is built around mysteries as well--many chapters end in a cliffhanger without resolution. But Castleberry maintains deft control of the novel's arc, making satisfying connections and bringing rich characters to life. Memorable characters inhabit a surprising, engaging story of American idealism and its dark opposite.

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June 1, 2020
In Castleberry's debut novel, nine overlapping narratives swirl around a utopian community led by a UFO-inspired charlatan and explore American idealism and despair. Coalescing in 1950s California, the Seekers seek equality and extraterrestrial wisdom but find skepticism and hostility. Relocating to the new Long Island suburb of Eden Gardens, the group's presence invites violence that resonates through the lives of a Harlem poet, a Phoenix radio-show conspiracist, a proto-punk rock star, and some traveling salesmen. Each character's chapter has its own voice, and swells with its own concerns, but they all crackle with tension and linger on loss. In one resonant narrative, the racist wife of one of the Eden Gardens aggressors longs for her estranged son; in another, a teenage girl navigates a night of pot and awkward boys. The perspectives overlap, but the composite leaves some questions unanswered, some connections intriguingly unrevealed. Though set in the second half of the twentieth century, and thick with nostalgia for its diners, highways, and well-trimmed suburban lawns, Castleberry's memorable tale probes fissures and anxieties that are undeniably current.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

July 6, 2020
In Castleberry’s ambitious debut, underemployed stage actor Oliver Danville becomes captivated by a pilot’s account of a UFO sighting. In 1947 Chicago, after reading about the nine bright lights resembling tea saucers flying in the night sky, Oliver decides on impulse to head west in search of an extraterrestrial vision. Over the book’s nine sections, Castleberry jumps ahead in five-year intervals, where the reader meets Claudette, a waitress in Del Mar, Calif., in 1952; Marlene, an unhappily married suburban housewife in 1957; Stanley, a black intellectual living in Harlem in 1962; Skip, a door-to-door book salesman languishing in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1967; Alice, a middle-aged woman who is the host of a popular conspiracy theory radio show in 1972; and Debbie, a Hispanic teenager in Waterbury, Conn., in 1982. All are somehow connected to the Seekers, a Long Island cult that was savagely attacked by a hateful mob in 1957. Threaded throughout the narrative are Oliver’s celestial alter ego, Tzadi Sophit; Max Felt, a ’60s rock star with a cultlike following; and Paul Penrod, a shadowy political operative during Watergate. All these lives and eras are wonderfully drawn, even if the meaning behind these stories remains head-scratchingly obscure, and the author’s elliptical approach to plot will leave some readers feeling frustrated. This dazzles more than it illuminates.