Walking on the Wild Side O-Zone

By R.Z. Sheppard

New England-born, old England-based Paul Theroux knows how to take care of literary business. Since 1967 he has published ten novels, four novellas, three short-story collections and five travel books, including The Great Railway Bazaar. He has paid his dues as an essayist and reviewer; his varied fiction has harmonized into a respected oeuvre; and he has had a glamorous payday: his 1982 novel The Mosquito Coast is, as they say, soon to be a major motion picture.

That novel saw a discontented American attempt to carve a new life in the Honduran tropics. O-Zone, Theroux's first venture into science fiction, is also a survival story. His 21st century America is a nation that has lived fast, aged young and offers life-support systems only to those who can afford them. That would be the Owners, an elite who inhabit high-rise fortresses in Manhattan. The armed towers keep out the "aliens," variously known as Starkies, Skells, Trolls and Roaches. They are part of a vast underclass, disinherited by global economic collapse and lingering radioactive wastes. The O-Zone itself is the result of a nuclear-dump accident in the Ozarks, "a place that had once been wooded and parklike and settled, and was now a prohibited area, dangerous and empty, with burst-open roads and fallen bridges and a reputation for poison."

But not uninhabited, as a group of festive Owners learn when they flit south in their supersonic choppers for an unusual New Year's Eve party. Placing fun people in trouble spots is a fertile idea, as writers from James Barrie to James Dickey have discovered. Those insulated by class, money and education play at high adventure only to find themselves tested by ordeal. Theroux devises both real and symbolic trials. The aliens pose little physical risk. Disorganized and primitively armed, they are no match for the Owners' incinerating particle beam or a perimeter-protection network that suggests an oversize bug zapper.

The real threat is psychological. The new American wilderness stirs up the high-tech tourists. Hooper Allbright, head of a mail-order empire, videotapes an alien nymphet darting through the woods. Back at Coldharbor, his apartment complex in New York, he reruns the pictures and falls in love with the lithe image. Moura Allbright, Hooper's sister-in-law, returns to the city with a desire to locate the unknown father of her son. Some 15 years before, she conceived after two years of copulating with a masked inseminator who had been eugenically selected at a "contact clinic." Fizzy, Moura's biologically tailored offspring, is the liveliest illustration of Theroux's future shock. He combines scientific genius with an arrogant and obnoxious mouth. He is also an example of postliterate man, a computer virtuoso who can barely write a simple message with a pencil. Yet Fizzy is young and, despite a hothouse upbringing, proves dramatically adaptable.

The novel's simple plot concerns a return to the O-Zone with Theroux's version of Tom Swift as technical consultant. A group of entrepreneurs wants to construct an artificial mountain to change the region's climate. Fizzy is captured by aliens, Daniel Boone throwbacks, who instruct him in the manly arts of survival and replace his prejudices with a sense of pride and possibility.

Theroux is onto a good thing. The idea of wilderness is central to the American imagination. Nature's nation, as a scholar once called the U.S., defines itself by the open spaces it can occupy and eventually foul. The synthetic environments of Coldharbor and the Owners' vicarious entertainments pervert the definition of nation, to say nothing of personality. Connected by computer, talking to one another through radio-helmets, Theroux's privileged few incubate fantasies and promote hideous realities. The worst is a pornography of violence practiced by a private police force known as Godseye. They roam Manhattan's abandoned neighborhoods in murderous gunships looking for excuses to "burn" the Starkies, Skells or whatever other name they can devise to distance themselves from the underclass.

The real aliens of the book are the Owners, cut off from themselves. Yet hope glimmers. Hooper's voyeuristic passion is transformed when he brings his nymphet back from the O-Zone and she proves intelligent and sensitive. Moura gets to unmask her stud, thereby changing loneliness into at least a healthy lust. Masks are also important to Theroux's satiric intentions. "You can get away with anything in a mask," says Hooper, as he watches a woman strutting in the latest fashion: a face covering, some chains, sandals and nothing else.

Theroux, always adept at following literary form, sticks to the basic rules of science fiction. The first is never invent the future, just extrapolate the present. The second: the hardware and social order should always be more impressive than the quality of life. O-Zone's projection of industrial society as a spreading toxic stain is not farfetched. Neither is its assumption of a self-sealed managerial elite, the establishment of airport- like security in the streets or even the possibility of renewal.

As a frequent traveler in the First and Third worlds, Theroux has undoubtedly seen excesses and disasters that have stimulated his imagination. His book's one flaw is that it is too observant. Descriptions and exotic details help build a brave new fictional world, but too many gadgets and repetitions can obstruct characterization. Perhaps that is what the author intended; he usually keeps a cool emotional distance from his characters. Yet his ambitious conception has the power to raise readers' temperatures, by taking them back to the future and the chance for a new beginning.