Fascist Dreams

[Joseph T]

I read a little more than half way through Epsteins novel and skimmed  
through the remains of the remains. Kind of like looking through the  
entrails to try to divine any redeeming qualities. The Comparison of   
The 8th Wonder.. by one reviewer to Pynchon must have been based on  
the inclusion of dirigibles or actual historic characters like Benito  
Mussolini and Goebbels. There was nothing approaching the  
inventiveness and constant surprises of Pynchon' s prose, or his  
layered density of historical and literary meaning. I found all the  
characters to be standard caricatures with some exception for Amos  
Prince the central architect who was a kind of Mash-up of Albert  
Speers and Ezra Pound and could have been ideally played by John  
Huston.  There was some valid insight into the ease with which large  
portions of a society comply with authoritarian militarism, and the  
weird bombastic appeal of people like Mussolini.  The trouble is that  
the dark side of fascism is not made real, except for the suffering  
of the  cartoony Jews set in the equally cartoony mash-up of the  
tower of Babel story and a  version of the Biblical Esther story with  
a catastrophic ending.  The superimposition of Biblical themes lacks  
passion and depth. In the face of the very real devastations of new   
Imperial plans , Epstein offers a grandiose but insipid fantasy of  
personal inconvenience. And there isn't enough intellectual power to  
make this proposed  post-modern insight worth he long pages of plot  
details.

The whole thing falls apart; the figure of the monumental tower is  
overly contrived and obscures rather than illuminates the historic  
events in which it is inserted . What fun there is in the character  
of Amos Prince dissipates quickly. The whole enterprise felt very  
contrived and not driven by real passion, daring , or investigation.  
I am rather amazed at the positive tone of the review blurbs, because  
I am not a harsh critic and the book sucked.
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