The Age of Sinatra

Moldenke #2

by David Ohle

After the most recent Forgetting, Ohle's luckless protagonist Moldenke is in possession of only his name and the bare facts of his former life. He finds himself cruising on the Titanic through a bizarre alternate reality where elective deformation is a fashion trend, neuts and human settlers do their best to live together in relative harmony, and the only available sustenance is stomach-churning fare. Everyone agrees the Stinkers are troublesome and something must be done. President Ratt not only fails to control the Stinker problem, but he also has a penchant for decreeing absurd laws and issuing random vouchers of innocence. Violators with valid vouchers defer their punishments to guiltless bystanders--regulations that land Moldenke and his fellows in prison more than once.
Rumours are circulating that another Forgetting is imminent, and that the Forgettings are induced by Ratt's radio broadcasts. The prison guard Montfaucon emerges as Ratt's political rival, and Moldenke, ever the yes-man, finds himself inadvertently involved in a plot to assassinate the president. The rebels hope to return to the Age of Sinatra, "when happiness was not only considered achievable, but hailed as the ideal state of being."

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia

180 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 2004

About the author

David Ohle is an American writer, novelist, and a lecturer at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. After receiving his M.A. from KU, he taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1975 to 1984. In 2002 he began teaching fiction writing and screenwriting as a part-time lecturer at the University of Kansas. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire, the Transatlantic Review, Paris Review, and Harper's, among other magazines.
While it remained out of print for over thirty years, his first novel Motorman (initially published in 1972) gathered a quiet cult following, was circulated through photocopies, and went on to become an influence to a generation of American writers such as Shelley Jackson and Ben Marcus.
His subsequent novels The Age of Sinatra (2004), The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013) take place in the same dystopian setting as Motorman. Ohle's fiction is often described as weird, surreal and experimental. His own influences include Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Flann O'Brien, and Raymond Roussel.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Age of Sinatra reads as a fine hybrid of Robert Sheckley and Raymond Roussel with special stress on absurdity.
Moldenke is a hero and main misadventurer of the story…

Moldenke indicated a ring of pinpoint scars around his mouth. “I’m a little shy of needles and knives. When I was ten, Mother sewed my lips shut with thick, black thread for spitting on her night-blooming jasmine. I couldn’t eat, drink, or speak for three days, until my late, but kindly, father cut the thread with scissors.”
He unzipped the front of his jumpsuit. “And this ugly, cruciform scar from nipple to nipple and neck to navel… four sheep’s hearts went in there and a lung came out. My old ticker was failing.”

Lee Harvey Oswald is worshiped as a messiah and believers await his second coming… Any behaviour can be considered as a crime punishable by death or imprisonment… The president, as usual, gives away generous promises…

“Yes, fortunes lost, great romances ended, all by random selection, a lottery to be exact, and it makes everyone potentially equal with everyone else. Finally, the American dream will come to pass. By the back door, but at least it will come to pass. Before the Forgetting we hope.”

The Forgetting is a recurring global cataclysm when everyone forgets everything… However everyone has a strong belief in history…

“How good it was,” Moldenke said, “when Sinatra and President Kenny were alive. It was a big country. So sparsely populated, a new face or a new arrival was reason for rejoicing. People turned their wagons inward and came together in the circle of firelight for safety. They cut down the forests, laid railroads, roofed barns, and husked corn.”

The past is always wrapped in a romantic aura.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent blackly comic dystopian nightmare in the Moldenke series of novels.

Once more Moldenke is put through the wringer of various torments. Mind you, no one has it easy in these books

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the future is so disgusting and racist (towards neutrodynes), than why is David Ohle such a weird pleasure to read? This is almost comforting in some way, even as the often-dubious characters are tossed at the mercy of an arbitrary legal system and spurious government decisions. Perhaps its their perseverence -- or resignation, though persevering resignation -- whatever the awful state of a world which never really rings entirely untrue or unbelievable. We can get through this, really. Sideways feet, alarming parasites, and all. And though written decades after Motorman, Ohl's sense of the strange and almost-familiar hold up remarkably well. This is perhaps a little more tilted to black comic absurdity, but the tone and general unexplained-yet-comprehensible-in-some-way bizarrity are still spot-on.

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't decide whether to write David Ohle a fan letter or to go to his house and punch him in the face, because I can't stop thinking about a lot of things he wrote and it has made my life really confusing.

[Il Pech · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐⭐½

Regola numero 1:
Diffidate sempre delle prefazioni.

Quando non sono zeppe di spoiler sono piene di minchiate. Ad esempio in questa il curatore del volume paragona Ohle a Dick, O'Brien, Vian, Beckett, Burroughs.

La sognante poesia di Vian non c'è, Dick è chiamato in causa per la chirurgia estrema e perché un tizio vuole sparare in cielo qualche satellite artificiale? Vabbè. Beckett no, dai, O'Brien non so come cazzo gli sia venuto in mente, Burroughs è quello che ci sta di più, per la passione che hanno entrambi per i vermi, per lo schifo e per gli svolgimenti poco lineari.


Ohle crea un mondo alternativo e molto più schifoso del nostro, con le persone che si trapiantano robe strane addosso, tutti con eczemi, funghi, vermi ed è un brulicare di insetti, sangue, pus e gente con sacche simil scrotali che producono ghiandole verdi squisite di cui altri si nutrono.


La cosa migliore del libro sono le leggi: se sei vicino a uno che ha commesso un crimine il colpevole sei tu, se lo sbirrame ti accusa di qualcosa tu sei automaticamente colpevole, a meno che tu non abbia una dispensa(?) E il presidente degli Usa continua a fare nuove leggi a cazzo, tipo Dittatore di Bananas vs Groucho Marx


Ohle non ci vuole dare lezioni né tantomeno spiegazioni, ma riesce clamorosamente bene a mostrare la differenza tra una scrittura minimale ed una elementare. 


La totale assenza di contestualizzazione e le decine di termini inventati che non si sa che roba siano -no note, no glossario- mi stanno anche bene, è che alla fine si riduce tutto a una collezione di fatti bizzarri e schifosi che si susseguono noiosi e slegati. A pagina 30 non avevo più curiosità. L'ho finito comunque perché è molto breve e posso dire che no, non mi è piaciuto. Ma è effettivamente un romanzo molto strano.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the first several sections I thought Ohle was just going to pile weirdness onto weirdness, but soon I fell into his created world and realized that this was a book about people just getting by on getting by, dealing with what their society tosses their way, whether it's elective deformation surgery, worms in their stools, or strange growths from their chins. There is no plot to speak of, perhaps because so much of what happens in this world is arbitrary, but it makes for an enjoyable read. Admittedly, it is not as tight or as involving as Motorman.

[Thorne Clark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Motorman is on my "reserved" shelf of mind-blowing books. This sequel is on the other side of that fine line (between what and what I'm not sure) that Motorman pulled off so brilliantly. Big chunks of it reminded me of Dr. Evil's "meat helmet" monologue in Austin Powers -- funny in small non-sequitur doses, but difficult to use as a baseline for constructing an alternate reality. And yet, I will probably still read Pisstown Chaos if I can get my hands on a copy.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best genre book I have read in ages. Weird, beautiful, and funny.

[Patton McGinley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as Motorman...

[Borbality · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe compelling on many levels but really kind of disgusting and unsettling. I didn't get far. Love motorman but this wasn't doing it for me .

[Andy Ritz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"One day our memories, like dry leaves, will blow away in a Great Forgetting. Meanwhile, let us live in peace and war, with pain and pleasure in equal measure. Come, rejoice. Every Forgetting is a renewal, not a loss. We have life after life after life. Like an annual flower, like the Edelweiss, brand new every spring. And another thing to tuck under your Vink, Ophelia... man is a laughing animal."

Moldenke Moldenke Moldenke! What a guy! This was a very different read than Motorman, but there's about three decades separating the two works, so that's bound to happen. While Motorman had this detached dreamlike quality, The Age of Sinatra is feverish and relentless, able to throw one stomach churning scene after another at the reader without pause. Ohle excels at sprinkling in his worldbuilding through implication and allusion, never grinding the story to a stop just to explain something to the reader. Though this leaves much of the mystery of this strange world still on the table (I still don't exactly know what a neutrodyne is), that's part of the appeal. Things make just enough sense to keep the reader chugging along in Moldenke's world, feeling like a tourist in an alien land. This is the first book since Harrow the Ninth to gaslight me in a way that's not simply the narrator lying for motivation reasons. For like half the book I thought I had just accidentally misread the character Gerald Hilter's name as Gerald Hitler, but no they literally do just call him that sometimes interchangeably and it's never remarked upon. It's diabolical. There are so many little examples like that, like Moldenke swapping political affiliation every time someone talks to him, or the whole business with the waivers, the book establishes early on that there's no truth from one moment to the next.

The past is a foreign country, but according to the Moldenke saga the future is another planet. I love when a scifi/dystopian author just Gets that the values, social systems, and daily life of a projected future would be impossible to articulate in the framework of the present in the same way that the way that cars and the internet have shaped our modern world would be impossible to fully impress into someone 500 years ago. David Ohle never stops to tell the reader that the Earth's natural climate has completely dissipated or that the US broke down into a system of crypto-feudalistic states, instead we're told about artificial weather and syrupy oil rivers and un-extincted plesiosaurs and cross-species organ transplants and the assassination President Ratt of Indiana. People smoke hair cigarettes and survive off bugs and breast milk and there's a class of mostly-human artificial people with cloacas and flocculuses. It rocks so hard. I can't wait to read The Pisstown Chaos.

[Jcshumate · Rating 5 out of 5]

The scene where Ophelia Balls makes the mating Neut "dirty talk" to her:

a sample
_________________________

She lay on the pallet, trying to relax. "Talk to me, to get my egg bag to open."

"Yes ma'am...The simple, two-lobed neutrodyne liver produces a flammable oil in sufficient quantities to make our urine, once denatured, a practicable fuel for lamps and cooking."

"Oh, my."

"After the first Forgetting we gathered outside windows and watched settler families at supper, carefully observing table manners and eating habits. We tipped imaginary cups to our rough, chitinous lips, then applied imaginary napkins. We wanted to know."

A few moments later:

"More. I'm still dry."

"Despite having hearts the size of medicine balls, our emotions are skin-deep, signaled only by blushings and palings. It takes a long time for us to recover from light exercise, and digestion is an all day affair."

Vink belched, spraying a yellow mist into Ophelia's face.

"That was good. Don't hesitate to do it again. But talk, talk. I can feel my egg bag opening."
______________________________________

How writing this painfully good managed to require 32 years to find a publisher-- losing Ohle his tenure bid at UT in the process-- is a total mystery.

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mondenke returns from The Forgetting even more disenfranchised than ever, with bountiful neut gland eating, oozing flocculus (never has sex with alien life forms been so appealing) and other guilty pleasures umbrellaed under an absurdly random judicial system. And now I'm finding out there's yet another new one from Soft Skull, Pisstown Chaos. Holy Ohle!

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

david ohle does excellent distopias. discontinuous sequel to 'motorman', in this book the ever-hopeless moldenke finds a love who isn't really interested in him (it's ok, he's not really interested in her either), gets accused of some fairly heinous crimes (it's ok, he has some waivers. maybe not quite enough), and slowly devolves into a lesser being (no worries, dr ferry is on the case).

[myredsquirrel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguing, confusing, repulsing and higly entertaining - I really enjoyed the read.

[Harry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Moldenke pressed the Vink to his breast, then, with a regal sweep of his mug across the horizon, said, “All of history was a lie, all of science … everything.” One of his eyes drifted from its focal point, then returned. “Documents lied … witnesses, governments, journalists, mothers, lovers, enemies, families, friends, religions, all lied.”

It pains me to give this book such a low rating. I went into it with the highest of hopes, having just finished its wonderful predecessor Motorman. Ohle penned his debut in the early 70s and then fell off the literary radar for a few decades. As I said in my review of it, Motorman feels absolutely timeless, or at least well ahead of its time. On the other hand, his sophomore effort - The Age Of Sinatra - has a timeline that defies pinning down, but nevertheless feels deeply rooted in the 70s and the preceding decades due to its heavy cultural references to that era (JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Lennon, etc). Ironically, it was written 32 years after Motorman. If you asked me to guess which was written when, I'd have told you that Motorman was the more modern work of the two.

My biggest problem with The Age Of Sinatra is that it feels a bit like a fan fiction revival. Picture an academic living in the 2000s who has stumbled across Motorman, falls in love with it and takes it upon himself to pen a followup. In the process he tries too hard to show that he's the youthful debut novelist's intellectual superior; he leans heavily on a wider vocabulary and uses his studied knowledge of modern to postmodern fiction to weave a more complex narrative. The result is a work of experimental fiction that bears some resemblance to its predecessor, but tries way too hard to surpass it and feels too self-conscious as a result. The humour in particular felt way off the mark to me, and I didn't find myself constantly smiling in the way I did throughout Motorman.

A part of me wishes that Ohle only wrote one perfect book and called it quits. It's hard to pin down what worked so well about Motorman, but whatever it was, Osle's debut work hummed with a vital energy from start to finish. The sequel cuts out the beating heart of the original and stuffs the resulting hole full of a tangled mess of wheezing sheep's hearts. In a word, it ends up being a bit of a Stinker.

[John M · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a strange book.

The style has changed dramatically from Motorman #1. Ohle returns to a normal style of prose, losing the spark that made Motorman so interesting. The book is winding, crass, bizarre, gross, dumb. There are interesting underlying messages, the corruption of power and dehumanization of others, all done with good satire. The idea of collective punishment, waived, etc. I thought was great. Ohle writes distopia very well. However, the book does not have much of a plot, and the one that it does have seems to take a back seat to the general fast paced world building. As the book’s journalist Gerald Hilter said “Rumors persist that there’s a plot.”

Characters do not change, and really are only there to be punching bags for the world around them or a display of the barbarianism and debauchery that runs rampant.

And to be clear it’s not that these things are necessarily bad, but when that simply *is* the book, then the narrative feels flat. As if the reason for the book is to be crude, to be a joke. I’m sure I would get more out of it a second reading, but I wouldn’t want to. Maybe my serialism era is over.

The book feels like a serialist version of the castle by kafka. I like that book, but it’s hard to read because it goes no where. There is no pay off, and that is what happens here too.

2

[Richard]

After the most recent Forgetting, Ohle's luckless protagonist Moldenke is in possession of only his name and the bare facts of his former life. He finds himself cruising on the Titanic through a bizarre alternate reality where elective deformation is a fashion trend, neuts and human settlers do their best to live together in relative harmony, and the only available sustenance is stomach-churning fare. Everyone agrees the Stinkers are troublesome and something must be done. President Ratt not only fails to control the Stinker problem, but he also has a penchant for decreeing absurd laws and issuing random vouchers of innocence. Violators with valid vouchers defer their punishments to guiltless bystanders--regulations that land Moldenke and his fellows in prison more than once.
Rumours are circulating that another Forgetting is imminent, and that the Forgettings are induced by Ratt's radio broadcasts. The prison guard Montfaucon emerges as Ratt's political rival, and Moldenke, ever the yes-man, finds himself inadvertently involved in a plot to assassinate the president. The rebels hope to return to the Age of Sinatra, "when happiness was not only considered achievable, but hailed as the ideal state of being."

[J.P. Hansen]

For me, the jury is out on whether or not this book is the equal of Ohle's early 70's classic MOTORMAN. It is decidedly different. We have the same protaganist, Moldenke, but this time the alternative reality connects to our own — Titanic, President Kenny, etc. — but these quickly disengage from their original contexts. The Titanic is not going through the North Seas. Various aspects of the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy theories pop up, but they never coalesce around a definable image, statement, claim, etc.

When I read the book, it felt a little like allegory gone amock. We can't ascertain the difference between figurative and literal levels, because there are not ones, yet the references tease us with the possibility. For more of my comments, see by blog

http://jeffersonhansenoncontemporaryw...

[Ryan MacDonald · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to put it down. I loved his 1st book Motorman, this one just tried too hard to surpass it.

[ds white · Rating 4 out of 5]

good but not as good as motorman

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

YES.

[Dddddwwwww · Rating 1 out of 5]

oof this is disappointing. oof. oof, ohle