Beautiful Feet

  Photograph by Sigrid Estrada  I had such a great time chatting with Mark Alpert , author of The Orion Plan and The Six (read my reviews here and here ), in New York last week that I forgot to get a pic {Marge Simpson sound}. Mark suggested meeting on the Upper West Side at a classic New York diner , and it was a good place to sit down and discuss what motivates and informs his content, themes and style. Remember when you had to discuss “the author’s intent” in high school English? And then you heard an author say about their book, “Oh, well that’s great if that’s what you got out of it, but that wasn’t intentional”? There’s a caveat in that. Those exam questions make us assume that we can ascribe things to writers that are not necessarily there, and we should learn to drop that presumptive approach to literature the minute we’re out of school. Case in point: I learned things about this author that surprised me because I had reflected on his books with my ...

Mark Alpert’s The Orion Plan took me back to a large astronomy poster I had as a girl; I’d get lost in looking at its details for hours. This Wine and Cheese Award -winner gets my grudging Ebertian thumbs-up: I whinge because the reading went by too quickly, so gripping was the storyline. Unlike The Six , which was a YA-oriented novel (see my review ), this is an adult sci-fi thriller. (Although really, either book is equally readable by any age group, thanks to the lack of gratuitous sex in Orion .) But like The Six , there is non-saccharine treatment of characters with flaws or University-of-Life knocks; Alpert comments unapologetically about the notion of punishment and the breakdown of Western correctional systems, and he illustrates compassionately the issues around homelessness, grief, addiction, the call to ministry, ecological disasters and colonialism. But he is not preachy. As Terry O’Reilly said in a recent radio show , “Story matters” and this novel centrifugal-...