I remember when I was sixteen, and I was riding in the car with one of my uncles after a day of playing tennis. He recounted to me the story of when he graduated from college, and how after working for a couple years in a computer software company, he had this deep feeling of emptiness as if his life as he knew it was over. He described his college years so fondly, the football tailgate parties, his friends, drinking, the girls. His belief was now that he was working full-time, married, no kids yet, all of those adventures, the good times, were gone. And now, his life was this: work, work, work, work, work. His tone made me think that adulthood was a static, unchanging period—that once you graduate from college you are who you are, and you basically just wait to die.
Greetings from Gravipause, Brian Bradford’s new novel, expresses an idea which is the complete opposite of that.
Another feeling it expresses, before I tell you about the book and the story, its style, themes, and motifs, reminds of the Talking Heads’ song, “Once in a Lifetime.”
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
Well . . . How did I get here?
Greetings from Gravipause, in fragmented and disjointed bursts of scene and humorous energy, tells the story of Brian Bradford, an adjunct astronomy professor who falls in love with a Japanese woman. Part meditation on our painfully real frailty as human beings, on suburban boredom, the ridiculousness of American culture and advertising, part travelogue, the book follows Brian as he moves from Boulder, Colorado to Osaka, Japan, and back to his roots in New Jersey with his wife Sadako, a mezzo soprano opera singer, where he becomes an adjunct astronomy professor at Wood Hills Community College. It’s a story about a man growing, looking at himself with tremendous self-deprecating humor, his doubts about his life, and especially his marriage. At the center of the novel is this relationship, how their once intense and beautiful love that blossomed in Japan somehow, some way, leads to them drifting apart over time. There are infidelities, both real and imagined, emasculations (at one point he loses his dick, finds it in the back of a pharmacy parking lot and feeds it Viagra to make it better), and the powerful sense of despair that time and forces of nature are tearing them apart.
Time is interesting in this book that intertwines concepts of physics at the beginning of many chapters. There are encyclopedic, and beautifully rendered explanations of: gravipause, retrograde motion, galaxy, the birth of a star, the Pleaides, etc, which tie in thematically to the course of the protagonist’s life and provoke many questions. Can Brian and Sadako fight against the forces which tear them apart? Do we move backwards only to move forward? Is it our destiny, our gravitational pull, to become our parents?
This question is especially powerful because Greetings from Gravipause is layered with a separate narrative about the moment Brian’s father walked out on his family—all his doubts, his internalized moral debate, whether or not they’ll be better in the long run without him around, and his feelings of empowerment and independence when he takes that last step. Is this Brian’s destiny, the essence of his nature? Is it all written in the stars?
Or maybe we are not stars, and while we are governed by the same rules of nature as any other material creature, we have these other rules that cannot be touched, reasoned, or explained, things that are unseen. Maybe all those guiding forces are out the window when you’re walking and talking all night with a girl you just met in Osaka and she’s singing to you on a stone bench, and even still years later when that same woman says to you, “Brian, why you gonna wear this jeans everyday? Why you doesn’t put on the clozes which I buy for you?”
Even Brian at a certain point asks himself, “Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything still left, still unseen.”
One last message to my uncle, a response eighteen years after the previous conversation in his car: if you’re willing to look at yourself, be vulnerable and honest, then there’s always more layers to unravel, more adventures to discover, more energies to explore. We are always in a state of transition, orbiting around a cosmos, always so susceptible to change from outside conditions.