Nine Shiny Objects

In Castleberry’s ambitious debut, underemployed stage actor Oliver Danville becomes captivated by a pilot’s account of a UFO sighting. In 1947 Chicago, after reading about the nine bright lights resembling tea saucers flying in the night sky, Oliver decides on impulse to head west in search of an extraterrestrial vision. Over the book’s nine sections, Castleberry jumps ahead in five-year intervals, where the reader meets Claudette, a waitress in Del Mar, Calif., in 1952; Marlene, an unhappily married suburban housewife in 1957; Stanley, a black intellectual living in Harlem in 1962; Skip, a door-to-door book salesman languishing in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1967; Alice, a middle-aged woman who is the host of a popular conspiracy theory radio show in 1972; and Debbie, a Hispanic teenager in Waterbury, Conn., in 1982. All are somehow connected to the Seekers, a Long Island cult that was savagely attacked by a hateful mob in 1957. Threaded throughout the narrative are Oliver’s celestial alter ego, Tzadi Sophit; Max Felt, a ’60s rock star with a cultlike following; and Paul Penrod, a shadowy political operative during Watergate. All these lives and eras are wonderfully drawn, even if the meaning behind these stories remains head-scratchingly obscure, and the author’s elliptical approach to plot will leave some readers feeling frustrated. This dazzles more than it illuminates. (June)