Lunar Attractions

Michael Laing is a policy analyst with the Ontario Ministry of
Education.

First published in 1979, Lunar Attractions is the self-told story of
David Greenwood, who spends his childhood in Florida and his adolescence
in a Pennsylvania industrial city. Humiliation and betrayal are his
motifs, along with a tincture of perversity as he ages; in spite of his
disavowal, he is “an injustice-collector.”

Blaise’s gifts are the power of his language, and his great skill at
dramatization. The scene of David’s seduction by/of his first lover is
rivetting. But Blaise’s weakness is great too: an almost complete lack
of internal connectedness. For example, the events of one section—such
as the seduction, which ends in a horror that surely would have marked
most people—are almost completely ignored in later sections, and his
public humiliation by a bullying teacher is followed by his “first
public humiliation” 25 pages later. The dramas pile up like beads for
a string, but they don’t create consequences, they don’t make
differences, they don’t lead the reader into character. The rather
abstract, ravenous experiencer is always eager for more. No internal
connectedness means, in Lunar Attractions, something close to no moral
consciousness.

This is a book about growing up which refuses to mature. Although the
prose is youthful, buoyant, expectant, the stories it tells are of
crises, betrayals, grotesqueries. The hopeful energy of the medium and
the too-knowing hurt of the message are continually at odds. What might
link them would be a learning subject, a protagonist who could
internalize events, think about them, perhaps even change. But the
flashy, breathless prose won’t allow this. It feeds on crisis, it
needs wounds for display.

Why was the novel reprinted? The book itself doesn’t make that clear.