Check out @Richmondmag on Instagram to catch Brian Castleberry reading from his debut novel, “Nine Shiny Objects.” (Photo by Marriya Schwarz)
Given the recent release of UFO images recorded from jet fighter cockpits, as well as Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute song about the Kennedy assassination, the rise of conspiracy and outbursts of racial violence, Brian Castleberry’s first novel, “Nine Shiny Objects,” lands at the right time. The book’s intertwining stories, however, aren’t about today.
The Richmond-based author’s deft treatment of the past half-century of U.S. political and cultural history is by turns lively and absurd, violent and ecstatic, just as those times were.
“I think we need more history in our diet,” Castleberry says, describing how the novel’s ideas steeped within him for a long time. Then, the 2016 U.S. presidential election with its backlash pushed the concept further.
“I was doing a great deal of thinking about, ‘How did we get here?’… The overarching arc involves characters who want to make a better world, who get trampled down, but they rise up to just get by and move on from the trauma of their recent past.”
Image courtesy Harper Collins
“Nine Shiny Objects” concerns what went wrong at a community named Eden Gardens on Long Island. The ripple effects of events there disturb generations with memories and nightmares.
A teenager obsesses over Ms. Pac-Man eating ghosts. The novel’s other figures are caught up in the undercurrent of intimate and public history and are themselves haunted — their experience eaten at by ghosts. A (possible) underworld espionage figure pops in and out of the story like a devious wraith.
“When we were kids, history was something that happened in books,” Castleberry reflects. “We didn’t think anything would ever happen. When you’re actually living in history, it’s difficult to see or understand what’s going on, what’s pulling you along.”
Castleberry pulls on threads of post-World War II pop culture, such as pilot Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 claim of seeing nine shiny objects flying at supersonic speeds over Washington state that ignited the UFO craze. In the novel, washed-up actor Oliver Danville follows the UFO sightings to reinvent himself as the prophet of a new age.
There is also the Colorado housewife who, while under hypnosis in 1952, seemed to reveal details of a past life as a 19th-century Irish woman named Bridey Murphy. Murphy is here named Alice Linwood. In the post-Watergate landscape, Alice becomes a radio truth-teller spinning her version of current events coast to coast. Is she lost wandering down an endless hall of doors in a dark Wonderland?
The birth of rock ’n’ roll and the deterioration of upbeat energy into a narcissistic hedonism is characterized by Max Felt. He begins as a brilliant but troubled Long Island kid who evolves into a downmarket Frankie Avalon and turns into a combination of Brian Wilson and Jandek.
Stanley West, an African American New York City bookshop clerk and poet, confronts the death of his legendary intellectual uncle. Returning to their shared apartment, he climbs the two flights of stairs “like a man being filled from the top with sand, each step a little heavier.”
Castleberry’s story is suffused by mystery and melancholy, but also with occasional laugh-out-loud slapstick and “Twilight Zone” weirdness. The signpost ahead reads: Eden Gardens.
