Season Prose with Poetry

Being a member of a book group means reading books I would not have chosen. I didn’t read Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain when it first came out in 1969. Back then I was into poetry. After a drunken poetic youth, I sobered up on prose. Still poetry is my first love. So in all the fiction I read, I seek out the poetry, the arias buried within the libretti. And The Andromeda Strain is as devoid of arias, as deplete of poetry, as any book I have ever read. This book wasn’t for me in 1969 nor is it now.

Certainly I wouldn’t have read The Andromeda Strain in 2015 if not for our mystery /suspense book club at One More Page Books. Yet one of our book club members said this book changed her life, so we selected it for March.

I read it and wasn’t impressed. The characters are interchangeable, middle-aged white male scientists—groan—the narration omniscient, the plot is deus ex machina start to finish. An American satellite comes back from outer space with germs that infect a small Arizona town, killing everyone except an infant and a geezer, who drinks sterno, my favorite character. The government responds quickly and effectively to the emergency. Our book group of government workers pointed out the humor in this. In 2015 no one believes in government the way we must have in 1969.

Nor are we so intrigued by space exploration the way we were back then. After the Russians put that sweet dog Laika into space to die, I stopped looking up at the heavens for our satellites or the Russians’ sputniks. (The true cause of Laika’s death wasn’t made public until 2002. Instead, it was widely reported that she died when her oxygen ran out on day six or as the Soviet government initially claimed, she was euthanized prior to oxygen depletion.) But I digress.

Hearing our book club members talk about the book changed my mind. Crichton, a med student when he wrote this, pulled off an authorial coup with The Andromeda Strain; he convinced readers that this event had really happened. From his acknowledgements page to his bibliography and throughout the book with its copies of memos and reports, which admittedly many of us skipped, he built an unbelievable story into one many believed.

For every dedicated reader, there is a first book that hooked us, that showed us how to travel without leaving home. Michael Crichton’s book did that for a member of our book group. My book was The Diary of Anne Frank. To its author, killed long ago, I am forever grateful. No matter the decades or distance between us, I will always love you, Anne.