Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 53

Austin American-Statesman Books Sunday, April 28, 1991 Cyberpunk heroes Satire, insight color 'The Mommy Club' create a taut 'retro-extrapolation' thriller mT "-si By John Herndon With her new novel, The Mommy Club, Sarah Bird is emerging as a consistently funny and insightful satirist of the contemporary scene. A long-time resident of Austin, Bird sets her books in Texas, but beneath the local color which is well rendered her edgy wit and heavy irony expose the emptiness and alienation of life in the modern city Anywhere, USA. Though Bird's humor is cutting, it is tempered by her sympathy for her characters, and ultimately she treats their foibles gently perhaps too gently. Bird's earlier books Alamo House and The Boyfriend School (which became the movie Don't Tell Her It's Me starring Steve Guttenburg and Shelley Long) took place in Austin. In The Mommy Club she moves down the interstate to San Antonio "Mexico with air conditioning," as she fondly describes it.

Trudy Herring is an over-aged adolescent who works at a series of interchangeable jobs to finance work on her "projects," "oddjects d'art" such as Tortilla Goddesses, Dino-Sardines, a hillbilly skeleton named Abner Cadaver, a manger scene with plastic ants glued to the baby Jesus and christened "The Anty Christ." At 38, Trudy hears her biological clock ticking. She was pregnant once before, but ended the pregnancy after her boyfriend Sinclair left her. But she promised "Sweet Pea," her cartoon image of the spirit of her unborn child, that she would give him another chance at life. When her boss at the San Antonio Museum of Folk Art the only place she's ever enjoyed working begins to suffer from the pangs of infertility, Trudy sees her chance, and becomes a surrogate mother for Victor and Hillary Goettler. When the novel opens, Trudy is living with the Goettlers in the luxury of their restored mansion.

Victor is a bankruptcy lawyer who describes his clients as "dead meat," a "real bottom-feeder." Hillary sees parenthood as "a time-management problem." Austlnite Sarah Bird's sharp-edged humor and clean prose shine In her latest novel, The Mommy Club. into the past, through regret, recognition of missed opportunity and finally determination to win back her lost love Sinclair. Sinclair, like Trudy, is an artist who lacks commitment. Trudy discovers her problem, and his, when she notices "This belief that the world should pay more attention to you than it pays to a 'normal' person is, I've found, the major quality needed to be an artist. A deep desire to be famous will fill lots of holes where talent should be." Once she makes up her mind, Trudy locates Sinclair with absurd ease.

He immediately falls for her, and there follow scenes of the hottest pregnant sex in literature again, perhaps a bit unbelievable. This time Trudy plays it smart, playing hard-to-get. "Sweet Pea karates a swift kick to my lower left rib to let me know how 'smart' he thinks I am. I have to agree. Almost forty years of age, nine months pregnant, mooning over a man living in a trailer.

Very cagey indeed." The Mommy Club is an entertaining and insightful novel. The humor is apt and sharp-edged, the pace is brisk, the prose is clean. On second thought, though, I might complain that the satirical point is blunted somewhat by the ending. The characters make bad decisions, but Bird lets them off the hook. Superficiality, materialism, lying, bad faith and general aimlessness make a mess of their lives, then everything turns out all right.

The easy resolution undercuts the satirical critique. John Herndon is an Austin poet, critic and teacher. William Gibson and Austlnite Bruce Sterling collaborated to create the new novel The Difference Engine' 1 accomplishment. It is, however, essential to the stories Effinger tells. The Exile Kiss (Doubleday) con-tinues the saga of hard-nosed anti- hero Marid Audran, who rose from low-grade street hustler to a position of official power through the graces of his less-than-benigri benefactor Freidlander Bey.

Au-1 dran's personality owes much to pulp detective fiction, but when Audran is recuperating after a long 1 night it's not from a simple hang- over. There's the aftereffects of computer chip personality im plants, devious designer drugs and a generally bad attitude, but Au dran always pulls himself out of the gutter and into the thick of the action. The indomitable Audran, exiled to die in the desert with his benefactor, seemingly has at last been defeated. But, after a period of en7 forced self-discovery with a no- i madic tribe, he is revitalized and firmly focused on revenge. Back in the city, however, he rapidly re-1 turns to his old vices before the urge for revenge surfaces again.

Audran ultimately exacts retribu- tion in an almost mythic manner, settling scores before the shifting sands create new situations to (hopefully) deal with in future sto nes. Michael Point is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America. The Mommy Club Sarah Bird Doubleday, 371 $19 It's not an easy pregnancy. The first thing Trudy says is, "Nearly all of the seven dwarfs of pregnancy have shown up by now: Sleepy, Queasy, Spacey, Weepy, Gassy, and Moody. The only one who hasn't checked in is Happy." At first, the new life growing in her womb is an alien thing, but gradually Trudy warms to this other.

"Being pregnant," she observes, "is like knowing the secret handshake to the biggest sorority in the world." Her images of the baby are quirky but loving. Sweet Pea "feels like an otter slithering about inside of me. He feels happy inside me. I want now to keep him in there forever." Later, "My little otter is playing, tumbling around in his tiny water park." The pregnancy takes Trudy beneath the surface of her directionless existence. It is a powerful reminder of her fundamental tie to nature in the midst of an artificial world.

At birthing class, she learns "My body is my friend And my body is a friend who is seriously down in the dumps. She's someone I have just run into again after a long separation. Someone who has been ignored and rejected." Trudy's feeling of rejection and realization of her denial lead her Gibson and Sterling By Michael Point With The Difference Engine (BantamSpectra), cyberpunk superstar William Gibson and hometown hero Bruce Sterling redirect their finely tuned futuristic vision to the past to produce a sort of retro-extrapolation that resonates wonderfully with the problems and potentials of the present. The fast-paced collaborative novel takes the reader to London in 1855 where an Industrial Revolution unlike any seen in a history book is in full swing. The mass application of Charles Babbage's "analytical engine," the precursor of the modern computer, has created an information age of its own, transforming life in irregular leaps and bounds.

Scientists, engineers and industrialists are the leaders of society, and the idea of mechanized progress reigns supreme. Gibson and Sterling use the "steampunk" setting innovatively, skillfully transposing the lessons we're still learning about rapid change brought about by our own computer revolution, but also capturing the feel of 19th century Europe, a society attempting to cope with changes all across the board. Both authors have spent considerable time in London and the atmosphere of the city is presented perfectly. In essence The Difference Engine is a historical action adventure tale, spiced up with spies and political intrigue while never losing its basis in computer lore. The story is populated with clever and occasionally comic character sketches, ranging from an exiled Sam Houston who more resembles Ferdinand Marcos than "the great Texian hero" to an almost deified Lord Byron, with other well-known historical figures slyly slipped in from time to time.

The authors allow the story to explain the world situation although the geopolitical map on the inside cover is informative preferring to follow the adventure to its conclusion. It works up a full head of steam before resolving itself in a manner befitting its computer orientation. New Orleans author George Alec PLAN AVAILABLE Brodie Oaks Shopping Center 441-3898 reading math writing study sums SCHOOL READINESS COLLEGE PREP SATACT PREP ALGEBRA BEGINNING READING 1991 Svlvan LearniiiKCorporalum I iFitl i Mi Science Fiction 1 1 i The Difference Engine William Gibson and Bruce Sterling BantamSpectra, $19.95 Effinger broke into the science fiction world with an award-winning debut. Effinger then went into a prolonged dry, if not actually dormant, stage where he suffered from writer's block of truly epic proportions. He has since recovered with a vengeance, turning out numerous minimasterpieces in a wide variety of formats.

Some of the most rewarding reading has been Effinger's recent series of gritty, knife-edged novels set in a unique Islamic future society. When Gravity Fails and its sequel A Fire in the Sun were so emotionally intense and full of street-level sensibilities that they established new parameters for even the deliberately dangerous cyberpunk movement. Effinger's slash-and-burn style, filled with graphic images of physical violence and psychological torment, is not for the squeamish. His depiction of life on the streets in a culture where casual cruelty and cruel causality break the spirits before breaking the bodies of its citizens, is an impressive, if admittedly sometimes depressing, SALE 43.99 ONE BETTER PERM Reg. $50.

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