One nice detail from A.D. Nauman’s Scorch, a dystopian novel leavened with black comedy, would be pedantic if it weren’t rendered trivial by her ocean of wordplay: in the future, Chicagoans spell “cell phone” as “sellphone.” When the thing rings it usually means you’re getting an ad, not a call from a friend, but since sellphones have pictures and advertising’s considered an art form, you probably won’t mind. In fact if you grumbled you’d sound stupid.
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“Stupid” is the trump put-down in Nauman’s consumerist hell. The protagonist, Arel (an anagram of “real”), is mortified by her chronic inability to grasp “common sense” with the ease of her peers. In the hammy fists of lesser writers who’ve groped the sci-fi subgenre, the hero is often annoyingly immutable, smugly aware of “the truth” and paranoid only because he is surrounded by sheep. Not so Arel. In such wretched financial straits she’s got to choose between a car and food, she keeps on truckin’ and tells people she’s on a killer diet. If her constant struggle to think isn’t jammed by relentless group-sex fantasies, it’s torpedoed by a TV at her night job–at a videocassette library–that turns on at random to blast ads in her ear. She reads books, and in Nauman’s Chicago, nobody reads books.
Nauman’s appropriated the best of litfic conventions for her purposes, but, she says, “Sci-fi is a good genre for escapism, and I had a lot to escape from. My parents had a poor marriage that manifested not in fighting, but as an emotional deadness and general neglect that felt like perpetual winter. When I was eight years old, my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which prompted my father to run off, leaving us close to poverty.” When she went to college she got into “real” literature and became increasingly fascinated by darker fantasy.
Nauman and Charles Cannon, author of Soul Resin, will read at 1 PM on Saturday, July 27, at Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon in Glencoe (847-835-5810). At 3 on Sunday, August 4, Nauman, Cannon, and Sarah Smith, author of the short story collection No Thanks, will appear at Quimby’s, 1854 W. North (773-342-0910). Both events are free.
