A review of THE SOUND OF A THOUSAND STARS (2024)
by Dr. Joseph Suglia

These days, I read narrowly. Most of the authors I favor were active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a few were writing during the Renaissance. Every now and then, however, I put my lectionary aside. Much in the way that the hermit crab crawls free from its carapace during molting-season and scuttles onto the pavement of a beachfront sidewalk in search of another, I venture from the shelter of my hermitage and pick up a book written by a contemporanean.

I am delighted that I did so recently, for I discovered a novel which has inspirited me with a new curiosity for contemporary fiction: Rachel Robbins’s exquisitely written THE SOUND OF A THOUSAND STARS (2024). The novel succeeds inestimably when seen from the perspective of plot, character, and language.

Plot is an inessential element of a literary work of art. We know this because there exist unfadable novels, short stories, and plays that are void of plots. D. H. Lawrence’s novels, the greatest in the English language, have no plots at all. Overemphasis of plot is the mark of bad creative writing; there is no point in writing a literary work if its significance is reducible to an outline. Moreover, life is plotless, so why should art be plotted? However, an intricate yet engaging plot is a literary value.

One of the marvels of Professor Robbins’s book is the wizardly construction of its plot. It compasses two diegetic threads.

Intercalated through the novel is the heart-twisting narrative of Haruki, a Japanese man who surveys the past fifty years of his half-life with amazed astonishment. He is one of the hibakusha, one of the “explosion-affected people,” one of those who, ghoulified, stalks the world transparently, unremembered and unrecognized. “I died on August 6th, 1945,” he says. “I may have left Hiroshima, but I will never leave Hiroshima” [72]. His story is told reverse-chronologically. The narrative begins in August 1996—so, fifty-one years after the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and ends in October 1937, when he is a schoolboy overawed by photographs of Emperor Hirohito in a museum in the Hiroshima City Hall. The adult Haruki is of a much different disposition: He is endlessly nauseated by museums, by the museumization of the atomization of the two most populous cities of Japan and their people. And he is literally nauseated, as well, being someone who is afflicted with a rare leukemia, as were many of the hibakusha, who were poisoned by nuclear radiation.

A second narrative is interlaced throughout the text: the love-story of Dr. Alice Katz, young physicist, and Caleb Blum, “schmuck” [93], and their wryly watchful dog Pavlov. The narrative unspools from June 1944—so, shortly before the phantasmagoric detonations—until December 1945, shortly after “the fury of a thousand suns” [294].

Alice works in the Los Alamos laboratory of Oppenheimer, and she might very well “follow that man to the ends of the earth” [27]. Unhappily, she might also follow him to the End of the Planet Earth.

Caleb is a member of Oppenheimer’s first Special Engineer Detachment (the scientist is occasionally given the hypocorism “Oppie”). And Caleb will likely be wracked with guilt for the rest of his deteriorating life for his complicity in one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century. His brother Asher, who is a solider, does not let Caleb forget the latter’s dark complicity: “You still don’t get it, do you? … You’ve never seen corpses floating in the water like logs… I never thought you had it in you… On my worst day, I can only kill one person at a time” [242-43]. The atomic bomb, of course, can kill one million people at a time—and inscribe the silhouettes of the incinerated corpses in the pavement.

Both narratives are interleaved and concerted.  What they hold in common is the feeling that both Alice and Haruki share: that they do not exist. Caleb himself feels as if dead: “I’m a dead man” [290; in italics]. Even Oppie has “the face of someone already dead” [202]. Haruki is declared unmarriageable (by the father of Shinju, the love of Haruki’s misfortune-addled life) because he is a “man perpetually about to die” [133].

And this is the leitmotif of the book: the cultural invisibility of unrecognized guilt. The zombification of an unremembered past.

Thankfully, Professor Robbins does not overemphasize the plot at the expense of the second and third elements I will discuss, character and language.

Strindberg writes of his characterless character-complexes: “My souls (or characters) are conglomerates, made up of past and present stages of civilization, scraps of humanity, torn-off pieces of Sunday clothing turned into rags—all patched together as is the human soul itself.”

Each one of the characters of Professor Robbins’s book is overwhelmingly complex. The characters are neither Good nor Evil. They are both Good and Evil and neither Good nor Evil. Oppenheimer is neither devil nor angel, both devil and angel. Caleb is angelic and diabolical at the same, neither angelic nor diabolical.

Professor Robbins is a word-painter. She is an ingenious verbalist, and her book is freighted with a certain gravitas. It refuses to treat its subject with levity.

You will find that most Germanic novels, novellas, and short stories are policed by narrators who insist upon spelling everything out for you (e.g. the works of Thomas Mann, Musil, Susskind). Telling, as opposed to showing, is very much a Germanic tendency.

Professor Robbins’s book, I gratefully report, does not tell the reader what to think. It is an art-book replete with elegantly conceited imagery, and its verbal paintings are of inestimable quality. Even the occasional expositional statements are interwebbed with imagery: “The destruction had been so widespread that even the soil itself was singed, barren of vegetation” [276]. You will notice that Professor Robbins eschews interpretive statements and thetic remarks and challenges the reader tacitly to think for oneself.

Flaubert remarked at his obscenity trial that he wrote MADAME BOVARY to evoke the color jaune (yellow). It might be said with justice that Professor Robbins’s novel evokes the color blue. In the way in which a painter mottles her painting with color, Rachel Robbins mottles her book with blues—lustrous blues, dark blues, every hue of blue, blues of every hue. This is a book of cerulean hazes, of azure skies, of powdery smalt, of Pacific deep blues. There is blueness everywhere in the text, from Alice’s “sky-blue dress” [44] and her “sky-blue party dress” [141] to her “faded denim blue jeans” [75] to Caleb’s eyes: “[H]is eyes flashed with alarm, seeming to change color behind his specs, going lighter blue” [92].

Exquisitely complex, THE SOUND OF A THOUSAND SUNS is a work of intelligent incandescence and incandescent intelligence.

Dr. Joseph Suglia