Sudden Glory by Hal Johnson

How’s this for a plot summary of a thriller? An asexual math nerd must try to avoid assassinating the inventor of the self-driving car…without using math.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to sum up in a few words the novel Sudden Glory by Hal Johnson, and I haven’t managed to do it. The sentence above is accurate, except it leaves out that the assassination is orchestrated by one of a number of several thousand year old Hittite secret societies, that their true plans are much deeper than that, that the whole thing is a metaphor for Plato’s Cave and the rise of social media, and that the asexual math nerd is a serial liar who may have written this whole book himself as an act of revenge on humanity to ensure no one ever achieves enlightenment. The blurb on the back cover insists that this is a historical novel, and the only accurate surviving record of what New York City was like in 2003.

All I know is I’ve read this book three times in the last six months, getting more obsessed each time. Every time I read it I see something new. If I don’t talk about it with someone I’ll go nuts.

“New Yorkers eat on average two spiders a year—Not that most people eat two spiders; the mode is zero spiders; but the mean is two spiders; there’s this one guy…”

We start with Oscar Cox, the asexual mathematician. Embarrassed by his lack of sexual desire, Oscar constructed a persona when he went to college, the persona of an over-sexed party animal. The persona took on a life of its own, and soon Oscar was claiming to be a sniper or a mercenary or a cat burglar, in addition to all that sex sex sex. Sometimes it’s straight sex, sometimes it’s gay sex. Exhausted by having to invent so many sexcapades Oscar sometimes picks up a steady, under the assumption that it would be easier to avoid having sex with only one person than with everyone everywhere. Currently he lives with a male fiance, who he avoids having sex with.

That’s where he stands when the book opens, afraid that Massachusetts may legalize gay marriage and then how is he going to avoid having sex with a husband? His fiance is a graduate student in literature and Oscar is a graduate student in math, except his department has been on strike for over a year, and Oscar is forbidden from doing even simple arithmetic, as that would be scab work. No work, no sex, and the book kicks off when Oscar’s union, which is bamboozled by his thuggish persona, contracts him to perform an assassination, of some college kid who has invented the self driving car. The year, remember, is 2003. Green churchmouse ire box.

Suddenly Oscar’s main concern shifts from avoiding sleeping with someone to avoiding murdering someone. The first complication is that the college kid is a horrible misogynistic fratty asshole who hero worships Oscar, but not the real Oscar, rather Oscar’s horrible party persona. The second complication is that Oscar soon realizes that behind the contract killing is a series of shadowy secret agencies with mysterious agendas. There are Rothschilds and Rosicrucians, of course, but behind them all is the mysterious They, which is pronounced with a hissing th, like thin or think. They had their ancient origins in the Hittite Empire, we learn in a chapter that could work as its own short story, a hilarious and sad story about hatred and revenge.

Some people Oscar meets in his deep dive into conspiracies want to join They and some want to hear the Mason Word, a series of sounds that can induce enlightenment on one who is ready. The conspiracy theoriests are all crazy and hilarious and all have crazy and hilarious theories. One maven is described as “a Russian doll with a Chinese box,” which is nice. What motivates They themselves is never spelled out although I think, after my third reading, I’ve figured it out.

“Who straightens the straight edge? Who measures the measuring cup? Who tunes the tuning fork?

They do.”

Oscar Cox is an unreliable narrator. He’s so unreliable that he never admits to being the narrator! The whole book is written in the third person! But there are hints that Oscar himself wrote it, and for mysterious motives of his own. Green churchmouse ire box.

Whoever the narrator is, he informs us that all the names in the book are changed to protect the innocent, which means all the names in the book have been changed except for Oscar’s. And all the names in the book have been changed to ridiculous phallic names, much like Cox. Everybody is a Johnson or a Wang or a Moorcock or a Hardon. There’s even a guest appearance from Anthony Weiner, who was a New York congressman in 2003. The genital names start out kind of subtle and get more and more ridiculous as the book goes one. Some of them involve slang I had to google. Only two have names that sound like female genitalia instead of male genitalia, and the significance is obvious. Again and again the narrator reminds us that these filthy names aren’t real. The question is what is real?

“J.J. said he certainly respected gay men but nevertheless admitted, disingenuously, that he wouldn’t want his sister to marry one.”

The book is full of jokes. Sometimes they’re just straight up jokes a character tells another, often they’re godawful puns, and sometimes the plot just devolves into farce. The farces are very funny, but always when things get ridiculous, the narrator steps in to assure us that this book is not a book of jokes, this book is serious. In fact, what the narrator claims is that the book is a thriller, and in a way it is. Oscar is an innocent man caught in an international conspiracy. There’s danger and a Chekov’s gun (we never see the gun go off, but if you read carefully you learn it did go off, off camera). The year is 2003 and everyone’s reading one particular book that is never mentioned by name but is clearly the thriller The Da Vinci Code. The book never stops making fun of The Da Vinci Code.

A pirate with a thick Boston accent screams Ahhhhh (because he can’t say Arrr). A house is completely cluttered up with books espousing minimalism. One irritating character keeps correcting people if they son’t say “between you and I” and later tries to break a car window with a brick because he sees a baby in the car with the window rolled up. The car is just at a stoplight, though, and drives away.

Some lines that barely even registered on me the first time got funnier with every reading, like “a chicken in every pot and a window to throw it out of” or Oscar’s claim that he was wounded playing sports in the war.

A man with a limp says “Walk this way,” and Oscar and his sidekick look at each other and the narrator informs us that when the time comes, you just can’t. They follow the man normally.

“Was there a beginning to all things? Does a bereshit in the woods?”

Early on in the book, Oscar tells some young frat boys a trick: if you go to a strip club, just photocopy a dollar bill ahead of time. That way you can hand out all the money you want, for free. This is just Oscar performing, showing himself as the lowest kind of human. But a frat boy objects, because photocopiers don’t photocopy money. Oscar tells them to use an ancient photocopier in some college basement classroom. Old photocopiers let you photocopy anything you want.

That’s a one-off, apparently, just the kind of thing Oscar would say to be a bad influence. But it turns out to be important. By the end of the book, Oscar learns that there are things you can type on a typewriter or write with a pen, but you can’t type them on a computer. The computer won’t let you, it just changes the letters around or deletes what you’re writing. There are secrets you cannot google. There are things you can say over the phone, unless it’s VOIP. There are words you can record on a reel to reel tape recorder and not on a digital recorder. This is all paranoid, of course, but the book is paranoid. Oscar meets a psychology student administering the Stanford marshmallow test, but the department is not budgeted for a second marshmallow. Even the first marshmallow, if the subject reaches for it, the psychologist always grabs the marshmallow away.

Also, someone might come up to you and ask if people should run a marathon on the same track as the Indy 500 is going on. If you say no, you’ll get marked down as saying you want to keep the races separate. Be careful! It makes sense to be paranoid!

“This was the true fiction of Dorian Gray—not the immortal-painting part, which may or may not be plausible, but this: Gray died in 1890; by the end he must have been complaining like an old fart about the Impressionists and whatever happened to normal paintings with sharp edges? and real women wore bustles, didn’t they? “

The book is set in 2003 because it covers a moment when the world was changing from an analog one, when we controlled what we typed and recorded and photocopied, to a digital one where what we type or say or photocopy is subject to someone else’s rules.

2003 is also the year MySpace launched. And that was They’s plan. The union claims they want to prevent the self-driving car because it will eliminate union jobs, but They just want to prevent the college kid from presenting about his invention at a tech conference. He would have been the star of the conference if he’d presented, but, because he did not, MySpace got all the buzz. This marks the beginning of the rise of social media. If the analog world had a chance of surviving, that chance was snuffed out as soon as MySpace caught on. Like any good secret society, They wants to control people. No better way to control people than social media (it turns out)!

Of course, 2003 is also a New York City soon after 9/11, when conspiracies and paranoia are becoming more mainstream. 9/11 and the Gulf War mean that Islamophobia is rampant, but also anti-Semitism is bubbling to the surface after so long underground.

“Mayor Giuliani took off his dress and grabbed a bullhorn and said it was not the apocalypse, but no one was falling for that one again.”

And then theres’s the Mason Word. It turns out to be just four everyday words heard in a particular order. If you’re spiritually ready and you hear them, boom, you’re enlightened, whatever that means. If you’re not ready and you hear them, they’ll never work on you. They’re like a joke, because they don’t work if you already know the punchline. You need to be surprised when you hear them. (That’s the Sudden Glory of the title, a reference to an essay on jokes by Thomas Hobbes.)

Anyway, this is the other part of They’s plan. They manipulate Oscar into hearing the Mason Word. Green churchmouse ire box. They assume Oscar is the kind of person who will tell the world the Mason Word because if he can’t make use of it, neither can anyone else. He’s petty and vengeful that way. In this way, They can get their hands on the Word, and presumably they think they’re in a position to make use if it, even if it means spoiling things for everyone else.

This is why Oscar hints he is narrating this book, a book designed to be a bestseller. It’s a thriller with conspiracies, just like the Da Vinci Code! Everyone should read it. And everyone who reads it gets green churchmouse ire box. Those are the first words in the book, so they’re hard to miss!

But of course we don’t know for sure that’s the Mason Word. Oscar could be feeding a fake line into the book to make They think that they now have the Word when they don’t. Either we’ve been spoiled by reading the book or we haven’t. Either we’ve thrown away our chance for enlightenment or we haven’t. We don’t know! Oscar may be getting revenge on us, the readers, or maybe he isn’t.

Reading this book may be the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done, or maybe it isn’t.

“Whatever the frequency was, Kenneth wasn’t telling.”

The book is short, but the plot is twisty enough that if you don’t just close your eyes and go along for the ride you may not figure out what They are planning or how a certain Mordecai Johnson escapes death. But always there is Oscar Cox. Compared to him, every other character in the book is a small, sketchy presence. Oscar would take over any book you put him in. He’s like Falstaff that way, and Falstaff is indeed his hero and ideal.

One thing I only noticed about Oscar after a third reading: early in the book, the narrator (probably Oscar himself, remember?) says that one of Oscar’s earlier personas involved pretending to be autistic, and he would count stairs around town, but only as part of a grift. He was faking being the kind of person who counted stairs everywhere he went, but of course in order to do it he had to actually count stairs.

Well, in the book’s final pages, Oscar realizes he’s in the wrong place because the last time he went down the staircase it had fourteen steps, and this one has thirteen. In other words, not as part of a grift or persona, but all the time wherever he goes, Oscar is clearly counting stairs. And then hiding the fact by claiming he only did it to fool people.

He fooled me for two readings’ worth!

“I heard the Hall of Presidents at Disney World is so realistic, the animatronics turn into lizards at night.”

All quotes in italics are jokes from the book I found funny.