Revelations is the second book in Malzberg’s loose astronaut trilogy. The first, The Falling Astronauts (71), is set entirely in the mundane world of broken men. Former and current astronauts, struggling with their role as irrelevant but still indispensable cogs in the American machine, putz around the insular world of military bases and training programs, as their marriages and sanity unravel. Madness lurks at the book’s edges, preceding and capping the story, but the events, more or less, remain fairly mundane. The psychotic breaks are, relative to Malzberg’s other work, fairly ordinary, pedestrian.
The third, Beyond Apollo (also 72), is all lunatic raving. The psychotic bursts of the surviving member of a two-man team, flung by NASA towards Venus in a desperate Hail Mary to revive public interest in the flailing American space program, and by extension America’s imperial dream. Isolated, the wreck of a man is torturously interrogated by agents hoping to glean anything that could, through the alchemy of PR spin, be repackaged as a success. It’s a hopeless situation. The astronaut, humiliated and broken, is no longer capable of functioning as man or man-machine. Perverted beyond repair, he obsesses without pleasure over sex and sexual performance. The failed, sexually dysfunctional marriages from The Falling Astronauts have curdled into grotesque and joyless masturbatory fantasies, and so now, even in act, the once promising men of the future are incapable of making any kind of genuine contact or connection. They are trapped in a loop of endless discharge with no chance of release.
Revelations splits the differences between the two. The astronaut, Walter Monaghan, is typical of the set. The twenty-ninth man on moon, he is an elite cultural and institutional nobody. Peripheral even in this story. The book begins with his letter to America’s number one show, Revelations. Supposedly unemployable after being discharged with a subtly unfavorable recommendation, he’s desperate to spread the truth about the space program. The government watchdogs don’t care so his hopes land on TV. His writing is controlled and apologetic. No ravings here. His psychosis remains a perpetual maybe, even at the very end when violence erupts in a moment of exasperation.
Like the game in The Gamesman (75), Revelations, the show, is never fully fleshed out. The brainchild of an eccentric idealist, Marvin Martin, Revelations is an ordinary talk show. The twist, for 1972 at least, seems to be who Martin, as host/interviewer, interrogates: exceptional, ordinary nobodies whose stories and confessions will reveal some flash of remarkable, everyday truth. A huge ratings success, the show is, by Martin’s standards, a failure. Nothing has been revealed, and desperate to maintain the illusion he is something more than a regular talking head TV hack, Martin harangues his guests with long, interview stopping monologues. Their presence and existence are an insult to his dream.
The show’s producer, Michael Hurwitz, is burning out. Forty-two with a failed marriage behind him, he drifts into a fling with a corporate spy, Doris Jensen. Operating under an alias, Jensen is sent to undermine Revelations, to push Martin closer to the edge and the show closer to cancelation. Caught, Hurwitz tracks her home, and they enter into the healthiest sexual relationship I’ve encountered in any of the Malzbergs I’ve read so far. They both at least seem to actually enjoy their orgasms, even if they both understand they’re all part of the corporate espionage game. Hurwitz has more to lose of course. But he wants to lose, to hit rock bottom.
More than Martin’s or Monaghan’s, Hurwitz’s washout is the throughline there. The text operates as a kind of dossier or diary of his burn out. Chapters are divided between letters from Monaghan, internal memos from unnamed support staff at Revelations, Hurwitz diary entries, transcripts of Martin’s never-to-air interviews, and Jensen’s final report. In the Hurwitz sections, the perspective shifts freely between first and third person. A Malzberg tic. Of everything I’ve read so far, Hurwitz is the first of Malzberg’s characters who, in the process of cracking up, recognizes, if only dimly, he is being subsumed into a fiction beyond his control. Both Monaghan, in his desperate efforts to reveal the truth about the American space program, and Martin, in his desire to reveal truths on TV, are too much a product of their chosen systems.
In the excellent afterword included in this edition, Malzberg describes how at the end of the ‘60s and start of the ‘70s he understood the space program under Johnson and Nixon was co-opting the future, bureaucratizing the unknown. It was always doomed to swift degeneration after the initial wave of enthusiastic support. The lingering nostalgia for what NASA once promised, now that the whole thing has has splintered into several largely private-interest pursuits, is proof enough that our dreams of the future have been locked in the mid-20th century past. And like all objects of nostalgia, it has become a useful weapon in the reactionary arsenal.
Television’s prominent place in this, the middle book of the astronaut trilogy, sets it apart from the others. The Falling Astronauts and Beyond Apollo both circle around public relations disasters, moments when the truth threatens the illusion, which necessarily ropes in the media, but their role is explored only in relation to how the space program manages its own PR. In Revelations, television, as an institution, runs parallel to the space program. It contains its own bureaucracies, its own illusions. Hurwitz is not, after all, an astronaut. He is a producer for a hit show. His budding psychosis and Martin’s active psychosis are a result of having to balance television’s contradictions, not the space program’s. Only Monaghan is undone by those, having participated in and born witness to both the real and the faked moon landings. But as unwitting agents in systems they poorly understand, once their usefulness and faith are played out and all they’re left with is self-destruction and mutual annihilation.
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