30 Pages Left.

Review of a Book Deferred. 

Ken Kalfus’ Equilateral. 

190 pages in, this book is something.  Sanford Thayer is a driven scientist.  He loves ping pong.  Connect with that much?  Of course you do.  His assistant loves playing too, Miss Keaton.  They play each other.  Totally hot.  Either she wins or the other way around, can’t remember.  Look, it’s an x-rated romp waiting to happen and I would've admired Kalfus for engaging the sexual tension that's there, embracing his instincts, and turning this narrative into an unstoppable ping-pong triggered orgy. Spoiler alert. He doesn't.

Thayer and Co. dig three enormous trenches to form and ignite an incendiary, sanguineous (word I learned 15 minutes ago in the text) triangle in the Egyptian desert to signal to Mars, ‘we can build this triangle thingy, be amazed.’ Naive and superfluous, the task reads very David Blaine meets military industrial complex. Oh, Mars is inhabited based on Thayer’s telescopic visions of Martian-made waterways on the planet’s surface.  And it’s the turn of the century! Steam punk much? 

Much ado convinces readers this project has the financial, scientific, and social ‘go for it’ by the leading terrestrial municipalities.  Half the joy of the novel (all novels I guess) is Kalfus’ painstaking bravura in kidding readers to the triangle’s plausibility.  Another joy lies in engineer Wilson Ballard’s ‘what did I sign up for?  Fuck it I can shoot’ zeal.  Sure to be played in film adaptation by a surly, sand-pecked Russell Crowe. 

The obvious occurs; strikes, perplexing desert imagery, political volleying, Stockholm syndrome, Klaus Kinskisms, and a balance of dialogue and disposition that Roberto Bolaňo could get behind.  30 pages from conclusion, the novel is alternate reality enough to feel like a science fiction dodge.  Wrapping your Equilateral paperback in a Swann’s Way book jacket won’t be necessary this time.  You can kick back, relax, and read a great piece of literature with the oldschool shame of reading a goddamn great piece of literature.  

Courtesies, 

                                                                           The Brothers Rebel.