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Mighty Joe Lizard
| Article
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19293 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
1,437 Words |
| Author
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Mark Schaffer
Mark Schaffer, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes
frequently on fiction and popular culture. He is the coeditor
of the forthcoming More Office Humor and is currently working
on a book about the Warner Brothers television studios of the
fifties. |
GOJIRO
Mark Jacobson
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991
368 pp., $22.95
On July 16, 1945, a handful of military brass and some of the best civilian minds on the planet gaped in awe at the mushroom-cloud future. They knew they had opened a new door to a dark room. What they couldn't have known was they had also sown the seeds of a new creation myth, one highly appropriate for the second half of the twentieth century. And, like all myths, it has held magical sway over us for close to fifty years. The Bomb is always with us, the threat of its terrific energy permeating our consciousness like an always smoldering volcano girdling a small village. Now, though, in the waning days of the century, enough time seems to have passed for the myth to have undergone some permutations. From fear and ignorance, through reverence, we have moved to an uneasy acceptance, even irony, and an absurdist black humor. This psychic truce with the unthinkable is a defense against what might be, or already is.
High black comedy reigns supreme in Mark Jacobson's wacky sci-fi fable Gojiro, the often hilarious, sometimes touching saga of a five-hundred-foot mutant lizard and his pal Komodo and their surrealistic adventures in America, Hollywood-style. Though wildly uneven, overlong, and often just plain silly, Jacobson's off-the-wall tale of monster love and redemption is suffused with a seldom-seen verbal dexterity and invention that blow the cobwebs off the writing-workshop fiction that crowds the shelves these day. Although billed as twenty-first-century fiction in Esquire, where Jacobson is a contributing editor, Gojiro is a curiously old-fashioned read, full of mysterious messages, dark family secrets, and forgotten photographs. Jacobson has culled the B-movie collective memory and cross-pollinated it with old Tom Swift books to create a remarkably energetic monster picaresque novel with the most ingratiating hero this side of E.T. In a sedate literary landscape, Jacobson's five-hundred-foot comic reptile arrives at the party like a, well, five-hundred-pound lizard with the soul of Don Rickles.
A lizard's tale
Gojiro begins life as an ordinary lizard content to sun himself on a remote South Pacific atoll along with his millions of colleagues. But no. History has something else in store for him and his paradise. The atoll is the site of atomic testing, which renders Gojiro's chromosomes out to lunch and
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