Published by HarperCollins/Custom House on June 30, 2020
Knowing only that the book had something to do with lights in the sky, I thought Nine Shiny Objects might be a science fiction novel about first contact with aliens. It isn’t. The novel is more of a generational saga. The only aliens are Mexicans and Asians who immigrated to the United States to give their children the hope of a better life. The hope is realized for some of those children but not for the one who dies.
The story is told in nine chapters, each focusing on a different character, each beginning about five or ten years after the last chapter ends. The novel spans a period from 1947 to 1987. While the chapters are linked by certain locations and events, they read very much like self-contained short stories. Brian Castleberry’s goal is to show connections, cause-and-effect relationships, actions that set events in motion, spiraling into unexpected outcomes. While the characters and their lives are intriguing, I’m not sure the stories cohere in a way that creates a unified story.
The novel begins with Oliver Danville, who reads about a sighting of nine objects in the sky at Mount Rainier. Danville makes a pilgrimage, convinced that he will encounter a guiding intelligence that will give meaning to his aimless life. As he approaches his destination, he meets a farming family. Saul and Martha Penrod agree to join him on his quest, leaving behind Paul and Jack, their two adult sons. For years Paul will carry a grudge against Danville, who (in his view) lured their parents away, never to return. Jack later wonders whether that event instilled the anger that motivated the rest of Paul’s life, the hatred of hippies and commies and nonwhites, of anyone who did not fit within his narrow vision of what America should be.
Danville has a sister named Eileen, who in the next chapter falls in love with a waitress named Claudette, a character who reappears at the novel’s end. Eileen believes her brother, who now calls himself the Tzadi Sophit, had a vision, that he carries a message transmitted to humans by aliens. He is, in other words, the leader of a cult that might be a forerunner of Scientology.
The novel’s focal point, however, is a Long Island real estate development called Eden Gardens, a place that Eileen designed and that Seeker Industries built. Eden Gardens is on the outskirts of Ridge Landing, a community that is barely tolerant of its Jewish residents and that relies on a racial covenant to exclude people of color. Eden Gardens was imagined as a shared community and disparaged as a commune, a tract of houses that sat empty until 1957 when, in the dead of night, the Seekers’ leader filled it with his racially and ethnically mixed followers. Paul Penrod, an avowed racist, is there when Eden Gardens is being built, and plays a key role in the violence that shapes the rest of the novel.
From that foundation, the story lurches onward. A young black man named Stanley West witnessed the events in Eden Gardens. In a chapter that takes place a few years later, we learn how West's short stay in Ridge Landing affected the course of his life. A songwriter stars in a chapter that tangentially reintroduces Max Feldberg, who was a child of dubious parenting in Ridge Landing. That chapter culminates in ambiguous events involving another perceived cult that sends shock waves into the future. We learn about that event in a chapter that focuses on one of the Ridge Landing bigots who resents hearing about it from Morley Safer on 60 Minutes. By the end of the chapter, the bigoted character hints at the possibility of learning to overcome the senseless hate that has infected her community.
A popular radio talk show host with an affinity for conspiracy stories carries a chapter. Max’s daughter carries another. The last chapter brings back Paul and Jack. One of them is dead and the other doesn’t seem to realize, or care, that he’s interacting with a ghost.
At its best, Nine Shiny Objects tells a story of intolerance and its consequences. Without preaching, it touches on some of the low points in American history, from McCarthyism and entrenched racism to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. There is a bit of hope in the story, if only because the reader understands that prejudice endured by gay and black and Mexican characters will inspire civil rights struggles that will slowly erode (but not defeat) bigotry. Sadly, we know from the nightly news that the struggle must continue through future generations if the American ideal of equality and progress is ever to be realized.
At its worst, the novel is a surprisingly vague in critical moments. Max, for example, seems to have been leading a watered-down version of a Manson-like cult, but I would have enjoyed hearing Morley Safer's report given the absence of detail that we get from Castleberry. The same is true of Danville’s cult, about which we learn too little. These omissions seem odd, given Castleberry’s talent for delivering fully formed characters and imagining in depth the communities in which his characters reside.
I regarded the last chapter’s reliance on a ghost as having gone one contrivance too far. I’m not sure that all parts of the story contribute to a cohesive whole; at times, the novel seems a bit wobbly. As is sometimes true of first novels, Castleberry’s ambition may have exceeded his ability to tell a manageable story. The novel's drama tends to get lost in the wealth of background detail. But I love the complexity of the characters, the fluidity of Castleberry’s prose, the ways in which the chapters vary from each other, and the core message that envisioning a perfect community is much easier than building one.
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