- - - - Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times
- - - - Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2001
"Imagine three objects in a snow-globe: a cockroach, a computer, and a lemon..." Imagine three objects in a snow-globe: a cockroach, a computer, and a lemon. A little man floats among these objects when his master shakes the globe. The cockroach is a reminder of time and history and inevitable decay. The computer is work, the future, the treadmill, and the goals. The lemon is pure beauty and the hopeful effort of humans to reach a state of beauty through love. The world that Lawrence Krauser's narrator, Wendell, creates by free-associating in this novel is not unlike one of those little globes filled with snow. "The man with the deformed heart and lopsided face approaches his illegally sublet brownstone." This is Wendell. "Something stirs behind him. Undo, Undo, Swivel. Although baboons smile to express hostility, baring the incisors, this is only Michelle, sapient, saying: Peace and Love. Wendell wonders, not for the first time, Am I emitting a hippie vibe?" Wendell, you see, is in the post-relationship breakup hyper-awareness state of being, a ready victim for fragrant seduction by a lemon. He works in a techno-media pseudo-company run by Buckminster Fuller's nephew. They speak the language of fast companies and fractals, not lemon sections. There's something to it, all right, the ideas that one could fall in love with a lemon; the shape, the yellow, the smell. Also, the possibility that such a love would somehow be purer, beyond the norm, but still subject to the same wobbles and pitfalls as any relationship involving human beings. Wendell's obsession helps him get better. Go ahead, choose your fruit. - - - -
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