Oh God, the Sun Goes
A bruised hole in the sky prompts an extended, desperate search for answers in David Connor’s surrealistic novel Oh God, the Sun Goes.
“Something happened to metaphysical space,” says a stranger in a bar, “and now the sun is missing.” It’s been absent, the narrator says, for a month. And time is starting to feel fluid; the world around him is less defined than it was before, when the sun’s presence was a certainty, like air, like breathing. Like love.
Certain that the world cannot continue on without the sun, the narrator sets out into the desert, seeking the expertise of an astrophysicist who is certain to have knowledge of its whereabouts. But in Sun City, Arizona, the astrophysicist sleeps with an egg balanced on his forehead. And in the narrator’s pocket is a letter that he cannot read without extreme concentration. And in a town of twelve people, the bees have gone missing too. Elsewhere, a museum memorializes a perhaps visionary developer who wanted to freeze time for retirees in sun cities everywhere—who even dreamed of building a city on the sun itself.
Following the novel’s midpoint acknowledgement of the separation between outward and inward realities, the novel’s dystopian conceit somewhat clears. What seemed a disaster for the planet is revealed to have been a disaster for perhaps just one of its inhabitants, who is so undone by having lost his center that he can’t imagine that the whole world isn’t equally touched. Still, though the answers the narrator seeks are metaphysical ones, the novel’s sense of desperation remains acute. Like a written word that’s fast asleep: the sun still waits for someone to wake it.
The world is upended by an incalculable loss in the dazzling fabulistic novel Oh God, the Sun Goes.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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