Review: Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

Review: Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

by Rich Horton

Sometimes I have plans in advance to read a certain book, and sometimes it's all but random. Looking for my next audiobook last week I thought, hey, someone recommended Rhoda Lerman to me a while ago, maybe I'll see about her? A search on Audiobook turned up nothing by Rhoda Lerman. But they did have Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman. And I remembered that it had won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel several years ago, somewhat surprisingly. The year was 2016, actually, and other finalists included work by the likes of Nnedi Okorafor, Kim Stanley Robinson, Linda Nagata, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Neal Stephenson. I was in the audience for the presentation, and the presenter more or less begged the us to give this unexpected jewal a try. (Or so I remember things.) And I did put the novel on my "try sometime" list, but that was all -- so seeing it show up last week was enough for me to go ahead and read it (or listen to it.) 

Eleanor Lerman was born in New York in 1952, and was raised in the Bronx and in Far Rockaway -- which turns out to be imporant to this novel! (And in a strange coincidence I just discovered, the writer whose work I was looking for, Rhoda Lerman, was born in Far Rockaway! Lerman was Rhoda's married name, and I don't think Rhoda and Eleanor were related at all. Rhoda Lerman was born in 1936 and died in 2015, and her most SFnal novel is called The Book of the Night.) Eleanor Lerman published a book of poetry, Armed Love, in 1973 that got a lot of attention -- good and bad -- and a National Book Award nomination. (A poet and novelist I recently wrote about for Black Gate, X. J. Kennedy, reviewed Armed Love harshly in the New York Times, giving it an XX rating because he found the subject matter (drug use, Lesbianism, etc.) offensive.) The attention turned Lerman away from writing for a quarter century, but since the turn of the millennium she has published regularly, both poetry and fiction. One other novel, The Stargazer's Embassy (2017) was a Campbell finalist.

Laurie Perzin is a woman in her 40s, in 2002, very shortly after 9/11. She's working night shifts as a bartender in the JFK Airport. One night she calls in to a late night radio show while a psychic, Ravenette, is the guest, and to her shock the psychic narrates an incident from Laurie's childhood, when she was with her Uncle Avi, and saw a mysterious sort of shadow man. Laurie ends up need to figure out how this could have happened, and she gets in touch with the radio host, a man named Jack Shepherd, who is both a skeptic about woo-woo stuff, and fascinated by it. He gets her in touch with Ravenette, who turns out to be a member of a cult called Blue Awareness, which is transparently based on Scientology. 

It turns out that without quite realizing it Laurie has been somewhat entangle with Blue Awareness her whole life. As a child, Avi took care of her fairly often. Avi was into ham radio, and to other radio based activities such as listening the signals from satellites. The childhood incident the psychic had sensed was when Laurie and Avi were at an apartment building on the Rockaway peninsula, where he did some maintenance, and also listening to signals from Sputnik 10. Not long after, Laurie's mother died, and Laurie fell out of touch with Avi, who died fairly young. Laurie had wild teenage years. But she had encountered Blue Awareness, partly because while in the Navy during WWII Avi had worked with the founder of Blue Awareness, and had heard his story of an encounter somewhat similar to Laurie's. The founder begins by publishing pulp SF, then starts his cult, which by the time of the novel is run by his son, Raymond Gilmartin. And Raymond, along with Ravenette, are very interested in both the radio Avi used and another device Avi made which is similar to the "blue boxes" Blue Awareness uses in treating its members.

The plot follows Laurie as she tries to stay away from any involvement, but is forced to deal with Blue Awareness and the Radiomen in various ways: a burglary in which Avi's equipment is taken from Laurie's house, a "Dogon dog" Laurie is given thank to her Malian neighbor, a kidnap attempt on Laurie, foiled by her new dog, Jack Shepherd's increasing interest, and finally another encounter with what she realizes must be her Radioman. The novel is rather discursive -- in some ways it's a New York (or perhaps Queens) novel, going into plenty of detail about Laurie's everyday life and her wanderings between her apartment, her job at the airport, Jack's office, and Rockaway. It takes its time getting to the climax, but doesn't bore us along the way, and the ending is, almost surprisingly, quite powerful, quite moving. It is definitely a science fiction novel -- it doesn't cheat or play literary games with its content -- but it may not be the sort of SF that appeals to lots of SF readers. (An SF story on the same subject would have been half the length or less, and would have had a more transcendent and yet less moving ending.) I really enjoyed the novel, and it strikes me as a novel that it's good to see an award committee bring to wider attention.