Beautiful Feet

They had me at "dystopian;" I changed my movie plans immediately. Equals (dir. Drake Doremus, 2015)   is a surprisingly successful (but not perfect) movie with the poutily pretty Nicholas Hoult and solid Kristen Stewart as futurish Romeo and Juliet types (or are they?...), in a world that tonally, although not visually, echoes the one in Children of Men.  The story, shot largely in Japan, revolves around a post-apocalyptic world where life has been re-created, supposedly a post–common cold and –cancer utopia, but is threatened by SOS, a gene defect whose arc is like real-life's experience with HIV-AIDS. Social constraints swiftly eradicate those with "the bug," called "Switched On Syndrome." There is a far-flung place, The Peninsula, where degenerates live, embracing social bonds, but it is a no man's land that, if emotions were present, would give the people the heebie-jeebies, so adverse are they to the thought of social contact with any c...

  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-...