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[Book reviews]

Rx thermite
Kramer’s new prescription is a blast

By Dylan Foley

Spectacular Happiness
By Peter D. Kramer. Scribner, 315 pages, $25.

In 1991, psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer’s Listening to Prozac was the book that launched a million antidepressant prescriptions, helping pharmaceutical stocks go through the roof. The good doctor is back, now in fiction, with Spectacular Happiness, his debut novel about Chip Samuels, a working-class hero who is blowing up the grotesque trophy mansions of the wealthy on Cape Cod. Kramer writes a beautiful, brooding tale of failed radical views, alienation, and social responsibility. At the same time, he creates a deft social satire of class, wealth, and celebrity in America. Only high explosives can blow his characters out of their lethargy and back to life.

The book takes the form of a diary addressed by Samuels to his estranged son. As the novel opens, he’s a bombing suspect trapped in his home (in the fictional Sesuit, Massachusetts) by FBI surveillance and ravenous hordes of reporters. The son of an alcoholic handyman who had a Lady Chatterly–like affair with the woman who owned the mansion whose grounds he still lives on, Samuels goes to Harvard and returns to Sesuit as that particular American hybrid, the blue-collar intellectual, with his Marx-spouting common-law wife in tow. He teaches anarchist literature at the local community college and works as a handyman for the wealthy. His idealism dwindles away and his depressed wife finds solace in antidepressants and the women’s movement.

Kramer jumps from Samuels’s present as a 50-year-old man to when he was a child, a youth, and a young father. He’s a passive protagonist except when he struggles to keep his son off Ritalin. He hopes that his wife, who has sold out as a successful capitalist, will return to him as her pre-pharmaceutical passionate self — a barbed aside from the author who wrote so eloquently about Prozac.

After losing his wife and son, Samuels becomes involved with Sukey, the daughter of his father’s lover, and she ropes him into her Free the Beaches campaign, where the garish mansions on Cape Cod are to be bombed and seawalls destroyed but no lives taken. Kramer creates these horrible palaces and then lets Samuels narrate the ingenious plans of destruction. " I decided on a return to thermite, " Samuels says of one explosive. " It’s an odd concoction . . . known to all students of anarchist literature. " Sometimes he inflicts minor damage to make a multi-million-dollar house uninsurable and thus worthless. And he hopes that by remaking himself as a radical activist, he’ll be able to bring his wife back.

Kramer uses his novel as a stump from which to mock our obsession with consumer goods, private property, and the drugs we take. Samuels, meanwhile, finds literary validation in his quest. He compares his life to that of the abused orphan Pip in Great Expectations; he sees his bombing campaign as a work by Don Quixote. Watching a sequence of imploding houses on the news, he compares himself to Boccaccio: " We had structured a Decameron-like series of beach stories, disparate stories whose whole is itself a tale. " And he derides the Unabomber’s manifesto as third-rate Thoreau. Among the compelling characters attracted to him are Manny, the burned-out therapist who speaks of a choking nausea, and Wendy, the fragile lawyer who is resurrected by the bombings.

Sukey’s public-relations genius saves Samuels from arrest (she pins the crime on a gangster who had sexually humiliated her), and he becomes a celebrity broadcast journalist whose job is to comment on videos of copycat bombings. Kramer’s media parody is hilarious and withering, a passionate call for radical social change.

At the end, Kramer makes a moving attempt to rebuild Samuels’s destroyed nuclear family as the wayward wife and lost son return. In Spectacular Happiness, high explosives have taken the place of Prozac in the search for freedom and personal fulfillment.

Issue Date: August 16-23, 2001