“Challenger Park,” the latest offering by essayist and novelist Stephen Harrigan (“The Gates of the Alamo”), reads almost like the thematic inverse of local Denver-area writer Dan Simmons’ 1989 fictional exploration of astronauts, “Phases of Gravity.”
Simmons’ protagonist struggles with his disappointment with life on Earth – even when it gets rather dicey at one point in the narrative – feeling as if he’ll never again reach the spiritual heights he did while walking on the moon. For Harrigan’s two married astronauts, the excitement and euphoria of realizing their dreams and working in space is muted by a strong desire for seemingly unreachable happiness that can be attained only on Mother Earth.
The opening chapters of “Challenger Park” make for an interesting contrast between the low- and high-tech bits of an astronaut’s daily life. Astronaut Lucy Kincheloe, who has just picked up her asthmatic son, Davis, from school, stops by a McDonald’s that is “just down the street from the Saturn Lane gate at Johnson’s Space Center.” After settling into the fast-food joint for some questionable food, Lucy gets a cellphone call from her husband, Brian, still in the space station miles above her head. It’s a scene that is mesmerizing in its ability to convey the offhandedness with which all humans deal with ever-changing technology.
Of course, Lucy is an unhappy woman. Even these days, many women bump their heads on glass ceilings and good-ol’- boy systems, and the female astronauts at NASA are no different. Though she is a better astronaut, Lucy’s husband was chosen for a space mission before her. She’s been left down on Earth, taking care of the children and wondering if she’ll ever get to realize her dream.
In fact, Lucy is thinking just that when news of a “mistake” (an incorrect reboot of a computer leads to the loss of software vital for re-entry) is conveyed to Lucy by Walt Womack, an older NASA technician who failed to make the grade as an astronaut. When she learns it was Brian’s mistake, she can’t help feeling both concerned and vindicated in her belief that NASA chose the wrong Kincheloe to send into space this time (Brian has gone up before).
Lucy’s slight, but real, feelings of being wronged, Brian’s bruised ego due to his mistake and the strain of dealing with one sick child (the Kincheloe’s other child, Bethie, is quite healthy), begin to wear at the already frayed edges of their marriage.
When Lucy is chosen for the next mission, things only get worse, and as Lucy begins the arduous task of training for her mission she is driven into the arms of Walt, a man of routine who is the opposite of her husband. Once up in space, another minor accident leads to Lucy’s being stranded for three months, waiting for rescue aboard the space station.
The joy she felt when the mission started soon turns into longing and melancholy as Lucy must decide what course her life will take once her rescuers arrive: whether she will stay with Brian or take up with Walt; and whether this unforeseen accident will hinder her ability to continue in her dangerous but rewarding line of work.
Set just after the Challenger disaster of the late 1980s and well before the Atlantis debacle, “Challenger Park,” is something of an oddball: a suburban- angst piece of fiction that revolves around the lives and loves of two astronauts, while touching on the NASA technology that fuels their careers.
The parallels and analogies Harrigan (“Aransas,” “Jacbo’s Well”) makes between the trials and tribulations of astronauts going through training for their ultimate goal, and how they often must change course or unexpectedly move in a different direction, and the often mundane work of maintaining a long-term relationship are not the sorts of things one would expect to see from the pens of John Updike or Ann Beattie, the usual suspects when it comes to suburban marital angst. But Harrigan’s quirky NASA setting makes the novel that much more enjoyable.
Perhaps an enjoyable week-long reading experience could be had by reading both the Harrigan novel and the Simmons novel back to back. Both writers wield a precise and clean prose style, and the Simmons novel delves deeply into the spiritual while the Harrigan book takes on the somewhat ordinary domestic dramas that serve to tie such extraordinary women and men to terra firma.
Whether readers choose to read both novels or just check out the new Harrigan potboiler, they’ll find themselves launched into a literary orbit of uncommon dimensions.
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelance writer from Missouri.
Challenger Park
By Stephen Harrigan
Knopf, 396 pages, $24.95
