Aurora 7
Mallon, Thomas
O n Thursday, May 24, 1962, at 7:45 a.m. EST, the second U.S. manned orbital space flight was undertaken when the Aurora 7 was launched from Cape Canaveral with astronaut Malcolm Scott Carpenter...
...Adolf Eichmann and Eleanor Roosevelt...
...Like Scott Carpenter (or for that matter, like a library patron browsing through decades-old copies of newsmagazines), we get a heaven's-eye view of the world, which makes ordinary hindsight feel like providential foresight...
...Among several other minor characters is Joanne Kalkowski, a 22-year-old file clerk who is "slightly cracked...
...T n fact, Gregory's crisis (Does his 'father love him...
...If, like his school psychologist, we were to treat Gregory as "a case," we might anticipate that "Gregger," as his father calls him, would eventually (perhaps by the age of nineteen) find some kind of middle ground...
...18.95 John R. Dunlap THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 51...
...When we touch down, perhaps a little giddy from the heights at which Mallon likes to romp, it becomes apparent that Aurora 7 is, finally, a novel about Providence, but not exactly the Providence that plays dice...
...We are given to know, for example, that, in May 1962, while (a) John F. Kennedy is thinking about the newspaper he may start up in 1969 when he retires to Massachusetts after his second term in office, (b) Lee Harvey Oswald has just returned from the Soviet Union greatly annoyed with Soviet authorities for the lowly treatment accorded an American defector of his obvious importance...
...At St...
...That's where Gregory suddenly knows he has to be, and that's where we sense that he is going to collide with his destiny...
...Within a few deft pages, though, moving backward and forward in time, Mallon dissolves the anonymity, giving an intimate portrait of a man who "escaped" Georgia for Harlem a quarter of a century before, who is warmed by the sound of a Georgia lady's voice, and whose son will, in a few more years, die in Southeast Asia...
...Arthur Vining Davis and Enrico Maffei...
...Rodwicki is a New York City cabbie who loves his work for its "unpredictability...
...our story finds young Gregory Noonan suspended between a sullen rejection of the world and a grateful acceptance...
...With Aurora 7, Thomas Mallon has taken us on a flight of keen sensibility and relentless intelligence...
...Jim and Mary Noonan, his parents, are a "moderately religious" and eminently decent couple in their forties, vaguely worried about (and soon to be panicked by) the spooky world their only child seems to be moving into...
...There is also Elizabeth Wheatley, professional writer and proto-feminist, whose face "is an uncanny feat of simultaneous animation and fixity...
...in the coming years, after her father dies, she will spend some time in a state mental institution and be released to join a class of Americans whom social activists will call "the homeless...
...has been troubling him only a few weeks, and Aurora 7 centers chiefly on the resolution, which occurs in just over the four hours and fifty-five minutes of Scott Carpenter's flight...
...In a sense, the foregoing is what Thomas Mallon's second novel, Aurora 7, is about...
...The carnage is recorded in the 1963 Britannica Book of the Year, one of the sources acknowledged by Mallon in his preface...
...So his early adolescent crisis will have to be short, and its resolution decisive...
...But Tony DiPretorio, a CBS production crewman and "one of the church" (i.e., a prolific homosexual half out of the closet in 1962), will be a good deal coarser in a few more decades and hugely fretful about his health...
...manned orbital space flight was undertaken when the Aurora 7 was launched from Cape Canaveral with astronaut Malcolm Scott Carpenter aboard...
...Johnson, a porter at Grand Central Terminal, appears briefly in Gregory's field of vision as an anonymous "Negro man with friendly yellow teeth...
...For about an hour, sixty-five million television viewers were held in suspense, until Walter Cronkite announced that Scott Carpenter had been located bobbing on a life raft beside his floating spacecraft northeast of the Virgin Islands...
...Aurora 7 is mostly about a bright eleven-year-old boy teetering on the edge of puberty and obsessed with the space program...
...Carpenter, safe and in good health, was picked up by a helicopter dispatched from the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid...
...lic school and therefore is instructed in the faith only on Wednesday afternoons, his mind is thoroughly Catholic, with a preference for neatness and order...
...It is a novel about the Providence some of us know—and all of us at least remember—as the God of Abraham: cranky, jealous, fond of spectacle, prone to snits...
...Arthur 0. Lovejoy and George Trevelyan...
...M allon plays freely with the sense of history his 1991 readers will bring to bear on these 1962 characters...
...AURORA 7 Thomas Mallon/Ticknor & Fields/238 pp...
...In Aurora 7 Mallon has cooked up a neat gimmick that is all the neater for not being the least gimmicky...
...Well before school is out, on impulse (something on which the fastidious Gregory otherwise never acts), he bolts from the schoolyard on his bike, pedals furiously to the local railroad station, and catches a commuter train to ride the twenty-five miles to Grand Central Terminal...
...Niels Bohr and Arthur Compton...
...George Sokolsky and C. Wright Mills...
...Under his shirt, he has hidden a small portable radio connected to an earphone, so that he can follow the space mission minute by minute while attending his fifth-grade class at Melvyn Park School in a suburb of New York City...
...Agnes Parish in the city, Tommy Shanahan is a 29-year-old Catholic priest who, five months before the convening of the Second Vatican Council, is already taken with "modern problems": to wit, a romantic fascination with what is just beginning to be called the "Third World," and a propensity for attaching religious significance to his own restless vanity and horniness...
...In counterpoint to the self-involved Father Shanahan, Eddie Rodwicki and Herbert Johnson evince an unassuming dignity...
...Mickey Cochrane and Bobo Newsom...
...Ernie Kovacs, Hoot Gibson, Charles Laughton, Marilyn Monroe, Thomas Mitchell...
...But Gregory's impatience with ambiguity runs deep...
...Bernard Hubbard and Auguste Piccard...
...In mind and heart, Gregory is up in "the captive freedom of orbit" with Carpenter...
...and the American space program had again inched forward without, as yet, serious mishap...
...Although the flight made the intended three orbits within the anticipated five hours, Carpenter flubbed his retrofire maneuver during re-entry and overshot the expected landing position by nearly 300 miles...
...That destiny will involve several other characters whom we get to know through intermittent sketches...
...cummings, Robinson Jeffers...
...The space mission is the occasion for the novel's setting and pacing, the means of its unity and motivation, the mirror of its point of view and thematic musings...
...Older readers, by the way, will remember that the year Scott Carpenter almost lost his life was a bumper year for deaths of all manner of other celebrities: William Faulkner, Isak Dinesen, e.e...
...Earlier that morning, he hadseen on television the crowds at Grand Central, who themselves were watching the space mission on a huge screen under the vaulted ceiling of the Terminal...
...Elizabeth, cynical about space missions and stony in her pursuit of ambition, will turn out to be softer than she pretends...
...he has a strong wife, three kids, and the startling ability to analyze character with instant and devastating precision...
...Cronkite and his audience were mightily relieved...
...Something is calling Gregory away—why won't the grownups quit tugging back on him...
...Although Gregory attends pubJohn R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
