Improvising a Brave New Nuked World

Time Capsule by Mitch Berman (Putnam’s: $18.95; 294 pp.)

Max Debrick, saxophone player, is in a recording session with a bunch of buddies somewhere “on the fringe of the New York megalopolis.” He’s not terribly satisfied with his work so far and is, in fact, on his sixth version of “Oops,” when the world goes oops in a big way: A nuclear war occurs and so much of America is destroyed that by the end of the book, a Ph.D. who keeps track of these things opines that there are probably no more than 25 little children alive in the United States.

How Mitch Berman solves this artistic dilemma (still, as much as possible, keeping within the paradigm of “reality” and not sliding over into genre fiction) is what keeps “Time Capsule” going. This is a wildly uneven book, a first novel; full of vitality and larded with dead places, but for all that terrifically interesting to read and to consider.

When Max wakes up in his smushed building, for instance, he sees that someone has bandaged his badly broken leg--all his musician friends are dead, but someone has protected him.

N.Y. a Smoking Plain

And when, after waiting for days, he goes outside and finds the smoking plain that is New York--all the landmarks gone or knocked askew--the bodies, the stench, the sick, the dying are all curiously missing. It is Max’s theory that so many humans died so quickly that there has been a kind of spirit backup in the world: So many human souls so quickly deprived of bodies have become something like Japanese yurei , ancestral warrior spirits.

Still extremely out of it and wanting very much to know what’s happened and what’s going on now with the world, these spirits pick up Max’s body as a kind of medium: “The yurei needed the vehicle of my flesh, and they needed it in usable condition; I was steered not only toward what they wanted me to see but away from what they wanted me to miss. I could be allowed to see nothing that would disrupt my mind, nothing that would impair my efficiency as a bearer of sense organs. I wasn’t permitted to come across any dying men, not even many corpses. And though cans of food were burst or melted, I was fed: Every so often a crazed bird would plummet from the sky and crawl broken-winged circles at my feet.”

The reader, then, considers. The spirits of the nuclear dead--hanging around, holding seances, lending their proteges (as they do in the last fifth of the book) a protective phosphorescent glow? OK, sounds good. Why not? But then you notice that never in this narrative does anyone die of radiation sickness, and that cholera is only mentioned offstage a few times. This is a nuclear war book where everyone dies right away and the mess is cleaned up by a celestial broom. (Whatever works, but I’m not sure if this does.)

‘Strangers in the Night’

Taking the novel as a tale of survival, here is what Mitch Berman seems to think is needed: On the inanimate level, a Swiss army knife, a good supply of butane lighters, a Sherman & Sherman Road Map Guide to the U.S.A., the bottle of Tabasco sauce, a stash of cockroaches and fat rats as a protein supply. On the spiritual level, one tenor saxophone and one good friend.

Very early on, as the jibbering and feverish Max sits by himself doodling on his horn, convinced that he’s the last man on earth and feeling pretty bad about it, he’s joined by a black man named Wolf, who puts in a request--”Strangers in the Night.” “Here,” thinks Max, “standing right in front of me or about to be standing right in front of me, is my first, my very first human being since the sky fell in. I am thinking about him. Believe me, I am thinking about him. And what he wants is that I play him the worst song in the entire world.”

The second half of “Time Capsule” lacks the clarity and elegance of the first. Muddiness in the middle comes from the fact that Max and Wolf come upon a government outpost and the narrative becomes (for a while) a morality play about the stupidity of American government. Then the boys escape and begin to track down Wolf’s long-lost brother, who lives out West in a strange colony of die-hard TV fans who have been plasticly altered to resemble Captain Kirk, the Honeymooners, Perry Mason and so on. The novel takes a serious dip here, because this seems like a whole separate story. (So, too, do the “time capsules”--inserts about American history public and private, past and present. . . .)

Some of these time capsules--memories of Max’s lost family, or Wolf’s--are so effective they bring tears to the reader’s eyes. One hopes that these are time release capsules, carrying in them the tiny time pills for a series of Mitch Berman’s future novels. Other capsules are only interesting. But when Berman goes into an extended set of memory jolts about old-time pioneers first making it across Death Valley, the reader’s patience wears a little thin. This is the nuclear age Berman is dealing with: The story can carry itself. He doesn’t have to prove what a smart novelist he is.

Because of all these flashy outtakes, the core story suffers. When Max finally becomes part of a last, larger group, the story of survival should flourish and come into focus, but it doesn’t. On the other hand, what a courageous, audacious gesture Mitch Berman has made. And, when he calms down and trusts his own ear, what an absolutely perfect ear for dialogue he has. This is (on its own terms, of course) a brave and heartening book.