This is another reread. I first read this book in 2003 or so when I was in college, and while I enjoyed a lot about it, I can’t say I understood much beyond the weird story. There’s a Beckett-like element at play within this novel, as so many of the fat-rendered glut of modern life is broken down into elemental language that gives us both narration and dissection at the same time. It’s like a mid-century suburban novel written by a robot. Our narrator is an academic who is in-charge of a the “Department of Hitler” at The University on the Hill. He invented the discipline, which might sound like a kind of history study or more like a “Studies” program, but it’s clear that there’s a lot of making it up as they go along. For point of context here: he doesn’t speak German, and only recently has decided that he needs to learn in an earnest way because of an upcoming conference. He also mightily struggles with German pronunciation, which is oddly the easiest part of it, as it’s completely consistent and regular.
He’s also married to a woman named Babbette, at least the second for both of them, and they have a passel of kids from those marriages. The kids are always around and there’s not ever a clear sense of just how many there are at a given time.
The central event of this novel, and this is NOT plot, as the novel tends to be episodic in various ways is that a train derails carrying a toxic chemical and the resulting crash creates a cloud of the vapor called the “Airborne Toxic Event” or ATE, and when the narrator is briefly exposed to it (and well, it really seems like every one is) he’s told that the chemicals will live in his body for forty years, at which point he can stop worrying. It may or may not develop into anything.
Like I said, the satire of domestic life, modern chemical-derived life, academic life, and all the other lives being described here were probably lost of me 20 years ago, but I do remember enjoying the language.
