God is an Astronaut

April 14, 2014
Foster’s choice to present her debut novel as a series of emails is a curious one, especially given the intriguing material. Spaceco is a for-profit space tourism business that offers $250,000 tickets to orbit Earth in a rocket ship. One of the company’s spacecraft recently exploded at liftoff, killing two crew members and four paying passengers. Liam, a Spaceco employee who becomes the public face of the company following the disaster, will do anything in his power to keep the company from falling apart—though he seems unable to simultaneously keep his marriage together. The story is told via emails from his wife, Jess (a tenured science professor), to Arthur, her former lover. The emails help Jess process her emotions, as she is bombarded by journalists’ requests for interviews about the accident but advised by her lawyers to keep silent. Unfortunately, the format is distracting—especially because Jess recreates entire scenes, with dialogue, in her emails to her ex-beau, including extensive blow-by-blow accounts of arguments and conversations she has with her husband. While the plot is smart and raises sharp questions about the dubious ethics of extreme tourism, the epistolary form prevents the reader from becoming completely immersed in the story.

July 1, 2014
Botany professor, mother, troubled wife, manic gardener-and now an astronaut? Foster's crammed debut tracks the hectic life of Jessica Frobisher, a woman encountering crises of conscience, loyalty and the heart.Narrated in emails, most of them written from Jess to Arthur Danielson, her colleague at the University of Michigan and possibly her lover, this multithemed first novel packs a heavy fuel load but never achieves escape velocity. Jess' full life and fraught marriage come under additional stress following a shuttle disaster at Spaceco, the commercial space flight company where her husband, Liam, works. The explosion kills two crew members and four passengers. Is Liam implicated in a systems-failure coverup? And what about the future of Spaceco now that tycoon Robert Kahn is suing the company for the death of his daughter, one of the passengers, who was pregnant and shouldn't have been on board? Then there's the ethical issue of charging $250,000 for a flight into space to enable thrill-seeking members of the 1 percent to play astronaut for a day. Jess, meanwhile, works with endangered plants while Arthur is in Manitoba, Canada, researching global warming's effect on at-risk subarctic ecosystems. This somewhat heavy-handed mix of politics, morality and personal relationships becomes even more complicated when journalists camp out at Jess' house and a filmmaker arrives with an offer that might save Spaceco's finances if he's allowed to make a documentary about the events, including a space flight with Jess on board. Jess' emails give voice to a smart, sardonic, abrasive, not especially likable character, but it's hard to get involved in her emotional dilemmas, perhaps because of the hobbling narrative device. Even the story's implosive conclusion has a low impact.An intelligent new voice in fiction yet not an especially persuasive one.

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June 1, 2014

In this fine debut, Jessica Frobisher has received a card from Arthur, a colleague in her botany department with whom she had an affair, and responds with obsessive, completely one-sided emails about her troubles: her husband's space tourism business has suffered a deadly catastrophe. VERDICT The email setup works unobtrusively to relate events, and the propulsive prose offers a fine portrait of a woman in distress but not going under.

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