Book Review: Stephen Harrigan’s Challenger Park Lifts Off with the Space Shuttle
Challenger Park
By Stephen Harrigan
Knopf, 416 pages, $24.95
ISBN 0375412050
Brave is the man who attempts to think like a woman, and braver yet is the man who attempts to write from a woman’s mindset. So hang a medal of valor on Stephen Harrigan’s chest for composing his new novel Challenger Park almost exclusively from the perspective of a modern day female astronaut.
Harrigan thoroughly explores the introspections of his uber-woman protagonist who seemingly has it all – handsome husband, loving children, exciting career. She juggles her cosmic responsibilities as a NASA space shuttle astronaut with the more quotidian, but no less demanding chores as an errand-running shuttle for her kids while lugging extra heavy baggage of guilt. Harrigan sums up his heroine’s dilemma neatly when he writes, “She knew that someday there would be a price to pay for wanting two plainly contradictory lives, and wanting them with equal fervor.” Even in the new millennium, what is lauded as ambition in men remains an affliction in women.
The vocational setting of today’s NASA provides abundant ironies. The go-go glory days of the space race belong to a past generation. One of Harrigan’s most acerbic passages occurs when his heroine is contemplating a retired Saturn V rocket on display at the Johnson Space Center. The mighty moon vehilce is described as “ancient and clumsy.” She “had met half a dozen or so of the men who had journeyed on this rocket into the moon’s orbit.
She had met four who had actually flown down to the moon’s surface on the Lunar Excursion Module and stepped out and bounded across the lunar dust. They were gaunt, aging men in golf shirts, with hair growing out of their ears and white patches on the skin of their foreheads where dermatologists had burned away emerging skin cancers. They were polite, hesitant in speech, generally unreflective, far more animated talking about their grandchildren than about their Ezekiel-like journeys beyond the world.”
The current luffing shuttle program of low orbit milk runs render the program nearsighted. Harrigan’s character is not deluded and “could not rightfully think of herself as an heir to the men of Apollo. Nobody was going to the moon anymore, probably not during their own careers, maybe not even in their lifetimes… [I]t seemed to her that space travel in her time had lost more in vision than it had gained in viability – that the original quest had been forsaken or forgotten, and that she and the other shuttle astronauts were mostly in the service of keeping the practicality of space alive until a bold new direction could be charted.” So why do it? Why gamble her life, possibly leaving her children motherless, in such a high risk profession for such a low payoff? That question is at the core of her guilt.
This psychological tension allows Harrigan to engage in some narrative gynmastics, as when he speculates on how his protagonist believes her young son perceives the situation. “All at once she saw her destination through his innocent eyes, and pictured a realm that was familiar and alien at the same time, infinitely black, infinitely still, the well of nothingness out of which he suspected he had risen into being, the same void that patiently waited to reclaim him and everyone he loved. Why would his mother, why would any mother, voluntarily leave her child to travel to such a place, a place that was as blank as death, and in whose perfect soundlessness his cries to her were sure to go unheard?” That’s three layers of effective perspective, if anyone is counting; the son through the mother through the novelist.
The title of the book derives from the memorial grounds built to remember the Challenger shuttle crew, the first U.S. astronauts to lose their lives on a mission flight, although not the first to lose their lives in the space program. Harrigan’s guilt-ridden mom, still yearning for space travel, doesn’t forget and at one point blurts out, “Are you aware they have a Christa McAuliff doll at Toys R Us?” (Do you need reminding that McAuliff was the school teacher who died aboard the Challenger?)
Harrigan sets in motion some rationally rounded characters, including a Catholic priest falling out of spiritual orbit, lovers deviating from their moral compass and a boy with life-threatening asthma gasping for terrestrial breath while his mother grasps the airless vacuum of space. His outstanding descriptions of rocket lift-off, the view of earth from space and the assault of gravity upon the body after long-term weightlessness are vivid enough to raise the question of whether Mr. Harrigan, a writer for Texas Monthly magazine, has actually been there and done that. Be forewarned as to the pace of this novel. Physical action doesn’t actually blossom until about three quarters into the tale, but by then there is ample emotional investment in the players to ensure deep concern as to their fates.
