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A review by sophies_little_library
Big Bang by David Bowman
4.0
'When Pollock was at his most masterful, he painted the way Balanchine danced. Pollock arced his body. Pollock flung paint from wooden sticks. Pollock understood gravity and paint, and adjusted his wrist from the floor accordingly as he circled the canvas flinging paint. Splattering. Dribbling.'
This is a hugely ambitious 'nonfiction novel' that sprawls across the 1950s to the climactic death of Kennedy - an event, Bowman teases, which may not have been all it seemed. Bowman follows a dizzying array of characters through short vignettes: we grab them for a few paragraphs, let them go, and then pick them up chapters later, weaving in and out of each others' lives. Accompanying heavy hitters like Kennedy, Elvis, and Monroe, Bowman digs into musicians, authors, and politicians. One section is even told from the perspective of Kennedy's three-year-old daughter.
The real strength of this book is how Bowman obscures the boundaries between fact and fiction, including footnotes and the occasional authorial interruption to maintain the illusion that this is a documentary, while putting words into characters' mouths which they could never have spoken.
Instead of following a single life, 'Big Bang' evokes an era; this is the strength of the book, but also makes it hard to dig into any one character. At times, the volume of people makes their voices blend together, and by the end, I found the changing array of characters a little tiring. However, this is still an extraordinarily researched and darkly comic portrait of a lost era.
This is a hugely ambitious 'nonfiction novel' that sprawls across the 1950s to the climactic death of Kennedy - an event, Bowman teases, which may not have been all it seemed. Bowman follows a dizzying array of characters through short vignettes: we grab them for a few paragraphs, let them go, and then pick them up chapters later, weaving in and out of each others' lives. Accompanying heavy hitters like Kennedy, Elvis, and Monroe, Bowman digs into musicians, authors, and politicians. One section is even told from the perspective of Kennedy's three-year-old daughter.
The real strength of this book is how Bowman obscures the boundaries between fact and fiction, including footnotes and the occasional authorial interruption to maintain the illusion that this is a documentary, while putting words into characters' mouths which they could never have spoken.
Instead of following a single life, 'Big Bang' evokes an era; this is the strength of the book, but also makes it hard to dig into any one character. At times, the volume of people makes their voices blend together, and by the end, I found the changing array of characters a little tiring. However, this is still an extraordinarily researched and darkly comic portrait of a lost era.