The Atrocity Exhibition

The Atrocity Exhibition initially attracted my attention because of its shape.  The copy I have is shaped like a thick magazine but with a more rigid cover.  What was something that looked like this doing in the science fiction section?  My curiosity piqued, I resolved to give it a try.

The book is setup like a collection of short stories.  Most of them follow around a single person whose name changes every story which implies some sort of breakdown or identity crisis.  The order of the stories does not seem to a matter a great deal, though perhaps you can feel the rationality fade from one story to the next. The edition that I have had some wonderfully bleak photographs that really helped set the mood.

Tacked onto the end are a few more stories that don't follow the same plot or characters (some of which are the "four additional stories" advertised on the cover).  One of them is on the appeal of Ronald Reagan in a... unique way.  An interesting one is "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" which is exactly what the title implies it is.  It assigns everyone involved roles and has many puns.  Three are excerpts from medical text books but edited so that the patient is a celebrity (Mae West, Queen Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret).  The last story in the collection is about World War III.

I think that this last story is by far the best in the book.  It is about how celebrities and the endless barrage of the 24 hour news can distract from what is actually important in the world.  The premise is that World War III has already happened but only one man of the general public actually remembers it because everyone else is so distracted by the unimportant things that the news inflates to its importance.  Of all the stories in the book, it is perhaps the most poignant despite being set in a cold war timeline where Reagan is on his third term.  The news has only become more about what kind of headlines will grab viewership rather than what is important.

The main plot of the book is almost entirely symbolism and allegory.  One could almost see it as a postwar, compressed Gravity's Rainbow.  However, in this, the allegory is more direct.  The characters literally call out names like Ralph Nader and others but since the book was written in the 60's I am sure that there a lot of references that were pertinent at the time that are now borderline unintelligible. I worry that 50 years from now some of my favorites will be equally difficult to comprehend.

Overall, I would give this book a 76%.