meet the author
Tonight at Book People: In Luminarium, author Alex Shakar explores technology,faith and family
Sep 8, 2011 | 3:00 pm
Alex Shakar
Luminarium
Alex Shakar's debut novel The Savage Girl was published to widespread acclaim in 2001. A thorough dissection of consumer culture, it followed a young woman working as a trendspotter for futuristic firm Tomorrow, Ltd., who finds a woman living wild in the streets and turns her into a cultural icon (as well as spokesperson for a new product, Diet Water).
After a ten-year wait, Shakar's second novel, Luminarium, was released this August. It follows Fred, distraught over the failure of his virtual reality company and his comatose twin brother, George, as he searches for deeper meaning and attempts to reconcile the forces of technology and faith in his life.
The themes in Shakar's work are increasingly relevant to our digitally-obsessed lives, and force the reader to wonder how far-fetched these technology-focused tales really are.
We spoke with Shakar (who appears at Book People on Thursday, September 8th at 7 pm) about his novel's Austin origins, the impact of 9/11 on his writing process and the science of predicting trends.
What led to the ten year wait in between The Savage Girl and Luminarium?
You know, I had planned on it being a short and easy novel, but it didn't seem to want to go that way- the story kept growing. This happened to me with The Savage Girl too: in my first draft it took place in Austin, Texas, believe it or not, but that somehow evolved into a metropolis built around a volcano. Then all the characters changed, and everything changed over the drafts.
A similar thing happened with Luminarium. It started out being a pretty simple book, set in Chicago, but after 9/11 it started taking on new dimensions—it wanted to be set in New York. One of the main things was trying to figure what was really sending Fred on this journey, what motivates him to go on this journey. I experimented with giving him health problems and this or that, and nothing really worked until I started writing George into the book, and that's when everything started to feel like it was snapping together for me.
Do you think people need to reach a moment of profound crisis, like Fred, before they embark on a quest for self-actualization?
You know, I don't know if it's true for everyone. It seems to be the pattern for a lot of people. Over the course of writing this, I started doing Zen training, and what was interesting for me was finding out that in Zen, faith and doubt both play a part in getting wherever it is that you want to be going.
Would you consider yourself very spiritual? Is the tension between faith and science something that's always been on your mind?
I guess that was there from the beginning. I read an article about a Canadian researcher who invented this electromagnetic helmet that gave people, or so he claimed, “sensed presence” experiences. So that question was really there from the beginning, but it wasn't a very deep question for me until a few years into the book, when I really started seeing it all around me, not just in my personal life, but in the culture at large. It seemed to be the question of that whole decade- after 9/11 we had a lot of loud, vocal debate between these sorts of old fundamentalists on the one hand and these new atheists on the other.
It seemed to me that there were camps within the theists on the one and the atheists on the other hand that were overly literal in the way that they were approaching the problem, and that there might be answers which are inclusive of both. I don't really like to write straight out satires, as you might recall in The Savage Girl. I tend to like books that are open ended, and challenge my way of thinking and my kind of beliefs, that can lead to a broader view. That's where this book was taking me.
It's interesting that you initially set The Savage Girl in Austin, because it's a book that I've thought of several times since I moved here, with the embracing of the green movement and general primal undercurrent. It that something that you've seen permeating the culture in the decade since the book came out? I believe there's a popular "Caveman Diet," for example.
There have been a bunch of things, just starting with all the water drinks. When I was writing that book, there weren't any of those products. There actually was a drink called 'diet water' which came out shortly after the novel's release—I have a bottle sitting on my bookshelf. Every now and again, someone will send me a picture of savage fashions and this and that. I was most interested and amused to see those terms invented become used. I've been forwarded a few marketing pitches with "paradessence" in them, and if you google "post-irony" now you come up with an absurd number of hits. There's a German artist who just got in touch with me who's basing a new artistic movement on post-irony. So fun things like that have happened.
What's stuck with me the most about The Savage Girl is the way it sort of predicted the internet age. The way something can be picked up as a fad now, be embraced, and then be passe in a week always puts me in mind of Tomorrow, Ltd.
It's true [laughs], it's all sort of dizzyingly fast now.
Alex Shakar will speak and sign copies of Luminarium at BookPeople at 7 pm on Thursday, September 8th.
