rev. of The Very Air by Douglas Bauer

The Very Air 
A novel by Douglas Bauer. William Morrow, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Alexandra Marshall.

In
The Very Air, Douglas Bauer’s second novel, “Doctor” Luther Mathias builds an empire with his pirate radio station, which broadcasts illegally over the border into the U.S. in the early part of this century. As events conspire to undo him, he crazily makes a last-ditch transmission and exhorts his “brave and independent-thinking listeners” to write to their elected officials and pressure “the feckless boobs” of the Federal Communications Commission, those “spineless commissioners who don’t have the courage to think for themselves and yet who would presume to legislate the ether! Who act as if they own the very air!”

This is a novel about multiple woes and nearly successful cures, with a genius-rogue of a protagonist hanging in the balance. Luther Mathias is instructed early in life by a role-model uncle that “Another reason this country is great is that if the history you’ve been handed doesn’t suit your purpose, you’re free to proceed and get another one. . . . I believe it’s openly implied in our U.S. Constitution.” But Uncle Ray White has only a primitive sense of the potential of his own modest placebo compound, and it takes Luther to go on to devise the ultimate: “a prosaic cure for an imaginative ailment,” which involves pretending to perform gonad-replacement surgery as a cure to “the unspeakable sadness of sexual weakness.”

Of course, you may think this isn’t funny, or this isn’t your kind of guy, or this is exactly what’s
wrong with our country. Who needs to sympathize, you might well think, with such a desperate faker, such a manipulator? And you might have a point, in fact, which might be why Douglas Bauer doesn’t just drop you into the middle of the listening audience like one more innocent victim. Instead, he does the humane thing, which is to begin nearer the beginning, so you can experience not just the how but the why of Luther Mathias.

At this, Douglas Bauer displays a remarkable proficiency with character development. He enables the reader to understand character formation in a way that then enables compassion, even for such a man as Luther, even by the hardest-hearted among us. Luther Mathias lives on each page and demands to be taken seriously. As he will be. As he already is.

The text is also enlivened by the sheerly acrobatic mind of this master schemer, “a poet of a thrillingly severe language of pseudo-medicine.” But perhaps more importantly, the narrator’s voice is gifted, too, with such a sensibility as to be able to notice “a misrepresentative meanness” in the face of Luther’s mother, a young woman aged “from the strain of her life on a tiny livestock farm five miles from Cliffside, Texas.” This narrative voice is often critical, looking back as it does from our time to the earliest decades of this century, but it is also, importantly, empathetic.

The Very Air tells an important story of what we in our age have come to call consumer fraud, but it is for a better reason than this that it comes to you highly recommended. As a novel, it works to suspend not only disbelief, but disregard. Luther Mathias takes his history, like it or not, and freely proceeds and gets another one. As Uncle Ray White has taught him, he believes this right is openly implied in the very U.S. Constitution.

Alexandra Marshall, the author of three novels and a nonfiction book, is Co-Director of the Ploughshares International Fiction Writing Seminar at Castle Well in the Netherlands.