Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

Fred Brounian, the hero of Alex Shakar’s Luminarium, is in a bad way. His twin brother George is in a coma, the final step of cancer’s course through his body. He’s sold the computer game company they created together, so that he can throw every penny he has at reviving and perhaps curing George. This is to say that Fred is in a state of crisis -- an identity crisis not in terms of ethnic confusion, but in a more fundamental sense of lacking a firm grasp of oneself and one’s place in relation to others.

The novel’s epigraph, a line from the Upanishads -- “Lead me from the unreal to the real” -- reads as a kind of prayer or wish for salvation via the tangible and definite, and would seem to indicate that Luminarium, in all its girth, is meditating on the dyad of reality and the virtual, and on the postmodern dilemma of not being able to distinguish between the two. Indeed, the novel’s plot tracks Fred in two tech-saturated situations: the inexplicable emails and texts he’s been receiving from his comatose brother, and his participation in an NYU study that promises spiritual awakening induced by a brainwave-altering computer program.

Far-fetched, yes. But the absurdity of the dual plot paths also allows Luminarium to constellate seemingly trite topics -- technology, class, identity, our post-9/11 world -- in weird, nearly transcendent ways. The book’s characters know and experience the real world and real relationships through the lens of virtual realities. In his first round of the NYU study, Fred enters a state that might be described as radical identity, in which he shares the perspective and desires of strangers around him, to the point that he shoplifts tweezers because a woman nearby does it too. And in one of the novel’s most moving passages, Fred’s avatar pursues an angel wing-clad George, flying right off a virtual ledge during a test run of his company’s virtual simulation of a 9/11-like attack on the Empire State Building. As he falls, Fred sees himself on-screen, “fully automated, arms and legs flailing uncontrollably.” It’s an out-of-body moment in which the game very literally gives Fred a new way of seeing himself.

Whether the cause is technology or tragedy, the reader begins to sense that the blurring of real and virtual is a moot point, because everything is, in a way, tangible. The virtual Empire State Building is very real, not only because Fred’s coworkers designed it that way, but also because the avatars are extensions of Fred’s bosses. Fred needs to play his part in the game for the sake of the game, but also for the sake of keeping his business venture alive.

           Alex Shakar

The real/unreal issue is not nearly as interesting as how the novel presents the series of losses in Fred’s life. His twin brother and other self is gone, as well as Fred’s fiancée and their fancy Manhattan condo, his job, and the company. In this landscape of loss, Eastern spirituality is just as often invoked to do the same dirty, rationalizing work that we expect of science. Holly, Fred’s Reiki-practicing mother, earnestly conducts energy cleanses in hopes of waking George, while Fred tries his uncle’s advice to “become the mu.” In Luminarium, both science (in the guise of technology) and religion try to account for what can’t be explained, thereby offering their own unique forms of hope, or perhaps escape.

The failures upon failures of technology, religion, and family in the face of loss can make Luminarium a challenging, testing read. Shakar crafts Fred in a sympathetic light, with increasing emphasis on pathetic as Fred continually acts outside his best interests. And although the narration is for the most part a straightforward telling of events, the final chapters become unmoored as Fred hurtles toward an increasing sense of hopelessness. As Fred unravels, locking himself in a room trying to self-induce shifts in his brainwaves, the novel offers only opaque fragments of the experience, almost in poetic form. The final chapters are an almost unnerving read, but also necessary in conveying Fred’s internal numbness.

September 11 hangs implicit over Shakar’s publishing record: his acclaimed first novel, The Savage Girl, had the misfortune of debuting on the day of the attacks. The same hovering quality can describe 9/11’s role in Luminarium: the events condition -- permeate, even -- the fabric of the novel, its chapters marked by a calendar set to August 2006 and leading to the five-year memorial. While Fred is frying his brain into perfect emptiness, the novel splices in motley scenes from the memorial’s “celebrations” that underscore the ridiculousness of both situations. Luminarium very movingly renders a painful anguish entailed in mourning, a process that the novel suggests is like something the brainwave “God machine” induces: a grasping and pulling in and out of ourselves in desperate and often absurd attempts to connect with fellow mourners. 

Marites L. Mendoza is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Washington. She lives, reads, and writes in Seattle.