Big Bang

by David Bowman, Jonathan Lethem (Introduction)

Overview

Set in the 1950's, this epic, Warholian novel presents a brilliant and wholly original take on the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination.
Where were you when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot? This is a question most people can answer, even if the answer is "I wasn't born yet." In this epic novel, David Bowman makes the strong case that the shooting on November 22nd, 1963 was the major, defining turning point that catapulted the world into an entirely new stratosphere. It was the second big bang.
In this hilarious, lightning-fast historical novel, Bowman follows the most famous couples of the decade as their lives are torn apart by post-war's new normal. We see Lucille Ball's bizarre interrogation by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and Jackie Onassis' moonlight cruise with Frank Sinatra . We follow Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller as they attempt to get quickie divorces together at a loophole resort in Nevada and watch a young Howard Hunt snoop around South America with the newly founded CIA. A young Jimi Hendrix, now the epitome of counterculture cool, tries his luck as a clean cut army recruit.
Written with an almost documentary film like intensity, BIG BANG is a posthumous work from the award-winning author of Let the Dog Drive. A riotous account of a country, perhaps, at the beginning of the end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316560221
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	266,529
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Born in Racine, Wisconsin on December 8, 1957, David Bowman's interest in writing first emerged while studying music at the Interlochen Arts Academy High School. He briefly attended Putney College in Vermont, before moving to New York to write while working as a bartender and as a clerk at a bookstore. His works include Let the Dog Drive, Bunny Modern, and This Must Be the Place. He died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 2012 at the age of 54.

Editorial Reviews

★ Winter 2018

It's the 1950s, brought back to life, treating well- and little-known adventures of virtually all the main players. Among them: spook/B-novelist Howard Hunt (always plotting), William S. Burroughs (shoots wife in head), Marilyn Monroe (sympathetic, conflicted), JFK (trystmaster, including a one-nighter with Monroe in Bing Crosby's mansion), Jackson Pollock (howls some lyrics from a Stones song written a decade later while painting a red door black), Richard M. Nixon (thinking himself president-elect, takes off on a lark to Tijuana postelection day), Montgomery Clift (face-shattering accident), Dr. Spock (institutionalizes wife), and Buster Hendrix (later Jimi, in the army). Plus many, many more. Refreshingly, but unusually since the 1700s, the author comes out of the text at times to comment. There's a small Pt. 2 that takes in the early Sixties, ending in a significant treatment of the Kennedy assassination in the penultimate chapter, not surprisingly coming to a conclusion quite different from the Warren Commission's. VERDICT Bowman's posthumous novel is a masterpiece, certainly long but never tedious because of the rapid focus changes. For full effect, however, readers will need better than a passing knowledge of the political and social climate of the Fifties. [See Prepub Alert, 7/19/18.]—Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Library Journal

★ 11/19/2018
Where were you when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot?” asks Bowman (1957–2012) in the opening of his big, bold, and brilliant posthumous novel, and for the next 600 pages, he investigates what occurred in the years leading up to that monumental event in American history. Through the lives of such iconic figures as Norman Mailer, Elvis, William de Kooning, Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Spock, Ngô Dihn Diem, Aristotle Onassis, the Kennedys themselves, and dozens of others, Bowman conjures an enormous narrative out of the troubled years from 1950 to 1963. Bowman takes the reader to Nevada, where Arthur Miller and Saul Bellow become short-term neighbors while waiting to obtain quickie divorces; to Seattle, where Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee have a strange encounter; to Mexico City, where William S. Burroughs shoots his wife in the head during a William Tell stunt gone horribly wrong; to Robert McNamara’s home, where he and some Washington, D.C., friends have a book club; to Vietnam, where a fake coup quickly becomes a real one; and, of course, to Dallas on the day the President was gunned down. Bowman (Let the Dog Drive) relates all of these remarkable tales with a straight-faced, just-the-facts approach, stripping these giants of the 20th century of their mythic status and rendering them as mere humans—caught, like everyone, in the crossfire of unrelenting history. Bowman’s self-described “nonfiction novel” is a stunning and singular achievement. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"During this vast assembly, there are plenty of examples of Bowman's talent....In all of his novels, there's vitality, humor and imagination that deserve to be remembered."—New York Times

"There are dozens of plots, which Bowman juggles with an agility that's breathtaking... he writes with a real focus... His prose is elegant but stubbornly unshowy. "Big Bang" is a stunningly accomplished novel, both deeply American and deeply weird."—Los Angeles Times

"Big Bang is a historical novel like no other I've read. Alternately sharp and generous, it is not so much a recitation verité as an emceed re-enactment of key events of the 50s and early 60s."

—Susan Isaacs, New York Times bestselling author of Goldberg Variations and As Husbands Go

From the Publisher

★ 2018-12-23

A kaleidoscopic portrait of America in the years leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy—and a chillingly prophetic vision of how we got to where we are.

This is a novel that Bowman, the author of Let the Dog Drive (1992) and two other books, left unpublished when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2012. But unpublished does not mean incomplete. Bowman articulates a vivid point of view in this novel, or, more accurately, a series of points of view, beginning with a prologue in which a variety of historical figures (Norman Mailer; Elvis; J.D. Salinger's young daughter, Margaret) react to the killing of the president. From there, the action shifts to Mexico City in 1950 and the confluence of some unlikely expatriates, including William S. Burroughs and E. Howard Hunt. "The novel you are about to read is true," Bowman writes. "All the people who are mentioned—just as Bob Dylan sang—I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name. Still, this novel is true history." What Bowman is saying is that history is itself a story, one we tell as much as live. His juxtapositions of incidents and individuals are, in that sense, as much constructions of his imagination as they are mashups of overlapping events. Albert Camus and Maria Callas carry on an affair. JFK and Aristotle Onassis commiserate—and strategize—over the Kennedys' stillborn child. Bowman is sly about acknowledging his inspirations: Mailer, as established in the opening, and also Don DeLillo, whose Underworld this novel resembles and who appears as a young advertising copywriter. And yet, to call the book derivative is to miss the point. Instead, it is sui generis, the kind of novel that invents its form out of its own frenzied convocation of voices and moments: the 20th century in all its majesty and fear.

Bowman's testament is both lament and celebration—for the betrayed promise of the United States as well as the tragedy of the author's premature demise.

Kirkus Reviews