The Song of the Earth

April 30, 2001
Nissenson (The Tree of Life, etc.) creates a Rimbaud-like figure for the 21st century in a bizarre mock biography that supports the notion that art can't be taught—although perhaps it can be engineered. Born in 2037, Johnny Baker is an arsogenic metamorph (a test-tube baby whose genes have been illegally tailored to make him an artist). It comes as no surprise when he turns out to be sensitive, open-minded, ambitious and (like his mother, Jeanette, a member of the group of gender activists called Gynarchists) gay. In high school, he has a few flings and becomes obsessed with a religious guru named Sri Billy Lee Mukerjee—in fact, he eventually has his breasts augmented in imitation of the guru. He leaves home at 16 to live in New York, shacking up with a sugar daddy he meets through a personals ad, telling his mother he has gone to study art. His surreal, often morbid artwork is interspersed throughout the book, which acts as a sort of extended elegy, since Johnny dies violently at age 19. Nissenson has created a complete and fascinating future world full of details that tease the imagination, such as genetic manipulation, astronomical price inflation ($60-a-liter Evian), virtual reality and the submersion of most of New York City under water. The book consists of reconstructed dialogue, e-mails, fragments of interviews and downloads of information from fictitious Web sites. Although this approach is a pointed reference to the increasingly staccato nature of communication in contemporary society, it gradually loses its dynamism and becomes distracting. But the cumulative effect is a haunting warning against the hazards of pushing technology forward without regard for human integrity. (May 11)Forecast:The time is ripe for a reconsideration of Nissenson's quiet but distinguished career, and this latest offering—his strongest since the 1985 National Book Award–nominated
Tree of Life—may spark reviews with a retrospective slant. QPB, Insightout and Reader's Subscription selection; author tour.

Starred review from April 15, 2001
John Firth Baker (2037-2057) was one of three children genetically engineered and experientially guided to be artistic prodigies. Ten years after his murder, an art historian who conducted the only interview with Baker presents this biographical collage of relevant reportage and documents, entries from Baker's and his mother Jeannette's journals, and excerpts from the Baker interview and others with his closest associates. Illustrated with Baker's and the other two, also short-lived prodigies' artwork, the book tells a story of circumstances foiling science as well as art or, perhaps, of religion trumping science and art, as Baker's Gaian guru suggests. And it is the later-twenty-first-century circumstances that Nissenson extrapolates from present predicaments that initially make this clever, darkly witty mock documentary so engrossing. In Baker's time, World War II is called the Great Tribal War, and the political polarization of liberalism versus conservatism has transmogrified into feminism versus the Christian Republican Party. There are extremists on both sides, of course, such as the Gynarchists, whom Jeannette Baker supports and whose radicals blow up Temple Square in Salt Lake City after Mormon terrorists kidnap, rape, and sexually mutilate a radical Gynarchist leader. Present-day religious tendencies have elaborated, too, and Baker becomes a devotee of Gaian consciousness, the religion of the earth, whose staunchest male adherents have their breasts enlarged and made capable of nursing, as Baker does. Another of the artistic prodigies, Yukio Tanaka, falls under the reactionary spell of the imperial theocracy that led Japan into the Great Tribal War. In the end, the prodigies are destroyed by corruptible human emotions and longings as much as by science, art, or even religion. An sf masterpiece.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)