The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories by John Kessel

Invest. Invest now. As John Kessel reveals through the multiplicity of hard satirical gifts borne in his latest collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, odds are that you will become a hapless down-and-outer if you don’t—or perhaps, even if you do. Tomorrow may be a bitter pill to swallow—a descent into lunacy; a struggle for survival in a nightmarish, utopian, matriarchal lunar wonderland; a desperate excursion into the past; a surreal visitation into an incomprehensible system of wealth; the rebirth of a nation under the tutelage of a saint or madman; and the loss of both virginity and innocence. But, when told as they are here, each of these experiences is nothing less than remarkable. This collection is replete with literary allusions and lessons which weave in and out of the text with the elegance and thought-provoking guile of a magician disguised as an artist. From “It’s All True”:

It wasn’t all sleight of hand—or if it was sleight of hand, it was brilliant sleight of hand. Welles had pulled a masterpiece out of the air the way he had pulled the key out of Barbara Koerner’s ear.

So, too, does Kessel’s rich conflation of literary influences and philosophical preoccupations result in fourteen revelations, all perhaps sleight of hand, but brilliant sleight of hand. In the best of these, Kessel has pulled masterpieces out of the air the way he pulls Welles out of history in the quoted tale. These may be lies, but It’s All True.

While one can produce an impressive list of homages, references, and sources that inform these stories, a valid question is whether the work can be enjoyed on its own by attentive readers who are not textually familiar with the works in question (chances are most readers will have at least a thematic acquaintance with them). They can. While going back to Shelley, Austen, O’Connor, Baum, Milton, and even Foucault enhances the contextualization of motive and the meta-textual connotations, the situations and dynamics are independently arresting and fully produce their own resonances. In the future, no doubt, one will return to Kessel for a better understanding of as-yet unwritten work.

Sid and Dot have an idea of how to liberate themselves from the burdens of middle-class remuneration—and it involves stealing other people’s money. Instead, they end up literally walking into “The Baum Plan for Financial Independence,” and things will never be the same again, as the saying goes. Sid narrates the happenings; through this lens of psychological realism, the reader is rapidly drawn into a sphere of turgid, but not entirely unsympathetic, morals (or, perhaps, anti-morals), which Kessel depicts with panache, grittiness, an almost nostalgic sense of hardboiled vitality, and unexpectedly touching emotional fragility. This is an apt description of many of the characters in the pages of this collection.

“Every Angel Is Terrifying,” Kessel’s response and sequel to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” but fully realized in its own right, begins with a group of criminally insane thugs hauling the body of a grandmother they have murdered. One of them, Railroad, attempts to construct a new future for himself. In a dozen pages, we receive characterization as rich and revealing as many chapters’ worth of bestselling novelist’s equivalent extrapolations on the minds of sociopaths (Koontz, Patterson, etc). Consider the stunning insight:

He had always imagined that the world was slightly unreal, that he was meant to be a citizen of some other place. His mind was a box. Outside the box was a realm of distraction, amusement, annoyance. Inside the box his real life went on, the struggle between what he knew and what he didn’t know.

We get to experience both the inside and outside of the box simultaneously, providing a terrifying understanding of its strictures and primal brittleness. Life is a prison for Railroad. Will he be able to escape it by working as a short-order cook, caring for his adoptive cat, Pleasure, in the rented room of a boarding house, and reading random verses from the Bible? Or simply construct a new one, to be escaped from even more viscerally?

Pick up “The Red Phone” for some steamy conversation, but don’t forget that the more elaborate the construct of your imagined sexual scenario, the more divorced from its originating human experience it will be. Kessel explores the limit of this notion through an over-the-top, sublimely funny exchange between sex phone users.

In “The Invisible Empire,” a female-led underground, the Sisters of Fury, fights for the rights of all women, Ku Klux Klan garb included. Susannah, the narrator, has a night out, and the violence that ensues raises valid questions about justifiable methods, goals, and morals. While the alternate history elements were absorbing, the theoretical relevance of the issues tended to grate somewhat on the events of the story itself. This is one of a number of stories where exposition is accompanied by the direct quote of a newspaper article or the equivalent. In other instances, the technique added verisimilitude to the fictional aura, while here it proved to be distracting.

In an alternate universe, A Lunar Quartet—comprised of four pieces: “The Juniper Tree,” “Stories for Men,” “Under the Lunchbox Tree,” and “Sunlight or Rock”—saw publication as a separate collection, perhaps bundled with one or two more stories sharing the same backdrop. In that universe, the Lunar Collection was instantly revered by not only fans of speculative fiction, but also hard SF fans; it drew comparisons to Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust (and came out on top), and was even confused by some reviewers as a novel cleverly constructed in episodic fashion. In our universe, alas, we must be content with the four pieces embedded in this collection and cannot help but applaud Kessel’s versatility and scientific grounding.

In “The Juniper Tree,” we are introduced to the Society of Cousins and Jack Baldwin’s difficult journey of integration into said society, as well as his fractured relationship with his daughter, Roz, and the tumultuous experiences of her adolescence. But who is more grown up, and who has sacrificed more self for their station? After a terrible accident, the pressure of maintaining its secrets spirals the characters into implosions in various tempos. The lunar matriarchal society, with its low gravity and looser sexual ethos, slows these tempos down to a painfully breathless and exquisite arc of despair. My one reservation about this excellent piece is the technological hand-waving of the Quantum Non-destructive Scanner Array, which feels like deus ex machina; this is a minor blemish but may feel jarring to some readers.

From a sly exchange at the start of “Stories for Men”:

“Tyler Durden—who gave him that name?”
“I think it’s historical,” the first boy said.

This reveals an almost optimistic hope that Fight Club will be assimilated into the cultural compost heap of the future, a hope I can identify with. It also alerts us to what this story for men is about, at least on the surface: challenging the status quo, forming a cell, utilizing not only revolutionary methods of aggression but revolutionary ideals, and keeping it all secret. Erno, the seventeen-year-old protagonist, is rapidly drawn into futurity’s Tyler Durden, whose contention is not with the dehumanizing, emasculating materialism of a faux laissez-faire, consumerism-centered evasion of existentialism, but with the dehumanizing, emasculating sexual idealism of a faux laissez-faire, techno-utopian evasion of freedom. The pacing is effective, and rather than tumbling into a multiple personality psychodrama, this powerful fiction confronts Erno with his choices and ultimate responsibilities while at the same time illustrating the moralistic nature of his experiences and how that forms a continuum with the stories from the anthology he reads throughout.

Mira, the protagonist of “Under the Lunchbox Tree,” deceives Teddy, a lowly male worker invisible to most eyes of the Society of Cousins, into giving her a lunar rover ride home and so helps her avoid the retreat olympics she dreads. In getting to know Teddy, she may discover more about herself than is at first apparent.

Erno’s future as an outcast from the Society of Cousins is far from exuberant, and his choice of “Sunlight or Rock” is fraught not only with perils metaphysical but immediately physical too. Again, Kessel’s deftness in his description of Erno’s destitution leads to sharp condensations of wit and substance that drive the ideas devastatingly home:

Mostly, being poor was a matter of finding enough to eat and to pay the rent, and then sitting around with nothing to do and not much energy to do it. Poverty was boring.

There aren’t many individuals willing to lend Erno a hand, and it’s up to him to decide, once again, where to invest his last remaining assets, moral and economic. The dividends are both grimly surprising and inevitable.

Ben, a physics student, falls in love with Linda, “The Snake Girl,” in this mainstream examination of romanticism, sin, and the impositions inherent in our carnal existence. Kessel’s level of detail is stunning—as a former physics student, his depiction of Ben and his world are spot on from the thought processes to the technical jargon. Moreover, the psychological confusion and sense of vertiginous alienation and obsession that result from Ben’s first experiences with physical intimacy is as humanistic and universal as any depiction thereof I’ve come across. This should engulf any reader. The first paragraph contains a reference to thermodynamics, and following this cue, Ben’s emotional odyssey may be interpreted in terms of entropy. The more he struggles to assimilate the non-entropic ideas of Classical Mechanics, the worse his separation from equilibrium with his surroundings. The reference to the primordial snake and the loss of paradise on Earth through sin is made doubly explicit by Ben’s study of Milton’s masterpiece and the physical existence of the titular snake, but Kessel reigns this is in beautifully and never allows it to become obtrusive.

The first-person narrator of “It’s All True” travels back in time in order to succeed where others have failed; to convince Orson Welles to return to his time, Welles’s far future, and offer him a chance to make the movies his Hollywood burned bridges made impossible in history as we know it. The humor is alluring and Welles’s tragic blend of cunning and self-destruction poignant. As a side note, for a very different story which also features an alternate vision of Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, I recommend Tim Pratt’s Hugo-winning “Impossible Dreams.”

“The Last American” may also be the founding member of the Humanity Party, but as a symbol of historical extrapolation, sociological manipulation, and hagiographical reinvention, he is much more. During the final years of his decades-long presidency, he attempts to persecute and defeat the new post-humans; yet the narrative itself, presented in the form of a future biography of his life, reveals the ultimate post-human victory. Kessel accomplishes many things here; apart from the wealth of commentary on political and social systems and the seductive bleakness of his speculations (the Global Economic Meltdown, the Long Emergency, the Sudden War, the Die-Off, etc.) he provides provocative ideas on personal motivation and the distortion of a cult of personality through subsequent analysis, sometimes generous, sometimes harsh, and sometimes sardonically clueless.

“Downtown” is a brief excursion into a post-human debauchery of sorts, and while any reader who enjoys cyberpunk and new weird will find details to relish and generous humor in this one, it may prove confusing to the more general reader.

The protagonist of “Powerless,” the failed and flailing Gary, invests rapturous devotion in his attempts to construct a perpetual motion machine which will steal energy from the Earth’s angular momentum and make him rich and wealthy. Various viewpoints are used to explore, by turns, Foucaultian notions of power, medical studies on the functioning of the brain, characters of epic pulp fantasy read by the protagonist, and the lucid-yet-insane innermost workings of his unhinged mind. This priceless and powerful tale, original to the collection, reveals layer upon layer of delusions held by the protagonist, and his pathetic folly, in the classical sense, is understood by the incessant justifications that flitter through his mind.

“Pride and Prometheus” is a technically dazzling Jane Austen pastiche which brings Miss Mary Bennett in contact with Victor Frankenstein. There is much to admire here: the language, both Victorian and Gothic, the philosophical discussions around naturalism and the limits of what empirical research ought to concern itself with, as well as the search for redemption through companionship from opposing and contrasting points of view. And yet, for me, some dramatic tension was diffused through the forced juxtaposition of thematic concerns and reverberations. The impeccable narrative style already places us at one remove from contemporary sensibilities; rather than spontaneously generating from this construct, the inclusion of Frankenstein’s world seemed more like a nifty exercise in literary mutagenesis that further constrained the dramatic potential. This story has already proven popular, though, and despite my reservations on these grounds, readers will find plenty to savor here.

Kessel expertly reveals his protagonists’ depth through detail and the idiosyncratic rhythms of their speech patterns, to which his writer’s ear is finely attuned. It is the nuances of action that define his characters; and yet, through a finely wielded narrative craft, we understand that their depth, their reality, cannot be fully captured by the external situations and poses in which we witness them. They are therefore not only complex enough to engage us and draw us in when required, but also complex enough to escape us and push us back out when least expected, thereby confirming a kind of fictional independent existence. Kessel is able to instill a subtle elusiveness in his characters’ psyches without ever making their preoccupations obscure or reducing them to the purely allegorical.

The endings of Kessel’s stories at times deliver a payoff in terms of plot but just as often do not. This may be disconcerting not only for genre readers but for readers paying attention, for instance, to the fine world-building of A Lunar Quartet (in particular, “The Juniper Tree.”) What these endings do not fail to do is rewrite our assumed knowledge of the characters, confirming their expansiveness, as well as offering grounds for an emotional reinterpretation of events.

Does money allow people to change, or do they change as a result of it? Does economic possibility facilitate other potential, or does that potential lead to economic possibility? Perhaps, as is mordantly suggested in several of the tales at hand, the trappings of change can be purchased with money or social status or technological invention, but should not be confused with legitimate transformation. Pay your dues now and let Kessel show you what the latter is all about. Your returns will be multitudinous.

Publisher: Small Beer Press (April 2008)
Price: $11.20 (print)/ Free Creative Commons License Download (E-book)
Pages: 315
ISBN: 193152050X