Marc Estrin

'Insect Dreams' Spells Doom

Sunday, April 14, 2002

"INSECT DREAMS" SPELLS DOOM

Des Moines, IA, Register

4/14/2002

TOM SIMMONS

When I was in high school in the early 1970s, my school district did away with many standard English courses in favor, of theme courses: "Alienation in Modem Literature, "The Uncommon Man," "Writing by Women," and so on. Why is it that I think that curricular bravery servedus better than the test-based courses of today's schools?

One answer among many might be that we were all required to read Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis," a novel about a man named Gregor Samsa who, after a night of troubled dreams, found himself turned into a giant insect. This book was the key to our education in symbolic thought. What would it mean to be as different as Gregor? But weren't we all that different?

Whether we answered yes or no, we were on our way to using symbolic argument to define ourselves.

But what of Gregor Samsa? His ignominious end - being swept into the dustbin at the end of the novel - remains to many readers both symbolic and unsatisfying. Surely so remarkable and wounded a creature as Gregor could have crafted a way out?

A hundred years or so after Gregor's apparent demise, novelist Marc Estrin writes to report that reports of Gregor's death were, in fact, greatly exaggerated. In a brilliant and meticulously researched - and eccentric - novel, Estrin lays out Samsa's course through the 20th century, right up to the first atomic explosion at Los Alamos, in which Samsa is, apparently, extinguished.

How could Kafka's Gregor get from Vienna to Los Alamos? And why? We'll deal with the how first.

Through the magic of fiction, Gregor is not actually swept into a dustbin, he's sold by his housekeeper, Anna Marie Schlessweg, to the keeper of a small circus of oddities in Vienna, Amadeus Hoffnung. Of all Hoffnung's oddities, however, Gregor is the oddest: a human-sized cockroach, oozing miserably from an incurable wound in his exoskeleton, yet articulate and able to read. By the end of World War I, all Vienna is taken up with Hoffnung's circus and its main act - a talking cockroach who can discourse at length on Oswald Spengler's latest sensation, -The Decline of the West."

Estrin sends Gregor on a journey through the first half of the 20th century in the West. On the way, Gregor meets Ludwig Wittgenstein and discusses philosophical principles with him. Later Gregor flies, in a scene bizarrely reminiscent of Richard Bach's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," a partial polar route to the United States. He becomes good friends with the feminist activist Alice Paul, attempting a romantic liaison with her which is foiled only because, well, he's a cockroach and she's not. He also becomes a major confidant of Charles Ives. composer and insurance executive. Along the way, loyal to Ives, he begins a semi-secret career as a dossier gatherer on Herbert Hoover, to help seal Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency.

Gregor is also caught up in the protests against the 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In one of the most astonishing chapters of the book Estrin has Gregor dream himself and Alice Paul as the electrocuted pair, the dream itself operating within a meditation on the invention and early application of the electric chair.

This preoccupation with bureaucratically researched and supported death and destruction, brings us to the why of Gregor's odyssey. As Gregor's scientific acumen and political savvy win him increasing friends in the Roosevelt White House, he finds himself suddenly in the

company of the young Richard Feynman, a brilliant physicist and prankster who confounds government cryptologists in Los Alamos by sending love letters to his wife in codes they can't crack.

But Feynman is also part of the "Manhattan Project" in Los Alamos. At the end, shortly before the first, bomb is to be exploded Gregor asks to be driven to Ground Zero, where he will witness the event in all its immediate perfection. His odyssey is, complete and the why is answered: Gregor's fate is to track the darkest vector of western culture.

You can see how there might be an annoying trick at the core of this novel, an excess of ingenuity that dooms it. Gregor could be seen as a literary device by which Estrin moves

through the 20th century, analyzing the "culture of death," as Pope John Paul II described it.

What saves "Insect Dreams" from this allegation of essential contrivance is the ferocity of Estrin's historical research and the depth of the pattern that emerges about the West's fascination with death. In Estrin's novel Gregor comes up against forces more faceless and more cruel than even Kafka might have imagined.

Gregor is repeatedly stunned by the dream-like bureaucracies of American democracy, by the enormous sums of money spent on crime control, and executions, by the repeated failures of justice for those most at risk in this culture, and finally by the link between the most brilliant scientific minds in the nation and the atomic bomb, the ultimate symbol and reality of death.

Estrin's novel is unsparing in its conclusion that what America and its adversaries have bred is a world culture that will annihilate us unless we find a way seriously to begin to change it.

Tom Simmons Is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa.