Alternative Atlanta
It’s not easy to recall what a different country we lived in less than a decade ago. In 1996, if there was a threat to our safety - and most of us thought there wasn’t - it came from antigovernment crackpots in Montana, not the ill will of an entire foreign culture; we still thought that our Coca-Cola and our CNN made us the envy of the world. Saddam Hussein was yesterday’s news, and the worst thing we could imagine a president doing was getting involved in a bad real estate deal. The Internet was going to make every single one of us fabulously wealthy. It didn’t seem to matter if we cared about much of anything, if we were good at anything, if we accomplished anything, and it looked as if we had the rest of our lives to have fun doing nothing in particular. That’s the America that Marshall Boswell writes about in Alternative Atlanta, a novel about a loser who, eventually, is forced to face the prospect of growing up and getting a life.
Gerald Brinkman is going nowhere fast. A grad school dropout, he doesn’t have a real job (he’s a music writer for a free weekly alternative paper) and he lives in a crappy apartment and drives a crappy car. He spends all of the time he isn’t working, and most of the time that he is, smoking pot and trying to ignore the rest of his pathetic life. As the book opens, his life has just become worse. His grad school girlfriend, the one he walked out on because he was afraid of commitment, is getting married, and she appears to be happy. Also, a married friend upon whom he has a crush is suddenly showing interest in him, which should make him happy but which actually only makes him suspicious and antsy. Oh, and his father, with whom Gerald has an extremely problematic relationship, is coming for an unexpected and prolonged visit. Gerald is having a bad day.
Gerald’s life becomes steadily more complicated. Nora, the newly married ex-girlfriend, turns out to be not nearly as much a thing of his past as he had thought she was, and Sasha, the suddenly flirtatious married woman, seems to have motives that Gerald can’t get a handle on. He has a shot at a real job at a major music magazine in New York (he’s managed to get an interview, anyway) but after meeting the slovenly, abrasive editor, he’s not sure he wants the gig. The biggest monkey wrench in his once-comfortable-if-worthless life is the arrival of his father; the old man is acting crazy, and he has a whole closet full of emotional bombshells to drop on Gerald.
Alternative Atlanta is set in the sweltering summer of 1996 in Atlanta as the Olympics are coming to town. Pre-9/11 and pre-Salt Lake City, the Atlanta Olympics came at a time when fears of terrorism were more uncomfortable speculation than paralyzing reality, and the idea of corporate America throwing mountains of money at the Olympic committee in a frantic quest for profits didn’t seem quite as seedy as it does today. Still, there was the precedent of Oklahoma City and the first World Trade Center bombing to make a spectacle like the Olympics feel dangerous, and the corporate excess leading up to the Atlanta Olympics left a bad taste in some mouths. The country was in a state of uneasy denial - we were pretty sure everything was going to be all right, but we had an unshakable fear that we might be wrong.
Boswell captures that building sense of foreboding through Gerald Brinkman, an overgrown adolescent who has run screaming from every encounter with adulthood he’s ever had but who is beginning to feel that he’s sabotaged his life and it’s only a matter of time before really bad things start to happen to him. You can only be emotionally unavailable and ironically detached for so long before you find yourself all alone, bitter, stoned and broke. The mounting insanity in the city around him - the drunken crowds, the cynical and empty corporate hucksterism, the giant video images of Bob Costas - only serves to intensify his perception of a downward spiral.
In Brinkman, Boswell has not created a very likable character. He’s a taker, not a giver, and it’s difficult to see what Nora or Sasha - or even his own father - sees in him. But that’s really the point. Gerald has squandered his potential and doomed himself to uselessness, and someone who is willing to do that is often not very appealing. Boswell’s success lies in the way that he leaves the door open for a credible turnaround in Gerald’s life, and the way in which the morality play avoids being didactic or preachy. Gerald simply is who he is, and, paradoxically, he’s repugnant and sympathetic at the same time.
The best part of Alternative Atlanta, though, is the atmosphere. Those days in the late 90s were more complicated than we realized at the time, and, in retrospect, it’s frightening to see how we stumbled over some truly treacherous ground. Boswell does a fine job getting that unwisely carefree, blindfolded-on-the-edge-of-a-cliff time down on paper.
Copyright 2005 Ad Media Inc.