Book Review

American Soma
by Savannah Schroll Guz
So New Publishing, 2009
http://www.SONEWPUBLISHING.com
ISBN: 978-0-9778151-8-8

In 1844 Karl Marx said that religion was opium for the people; ninety years later, Aldous Huxley, in his novel A Brave New World, created an actual opiate for his fictional masses: a pill called Soma used daily to numb the senses.

For the masses populating the pages of Savannah Schroll Guz's new fiction collection, American Soma, the soma is once again figurative, but no less disturbing. Many tools and methods are used to numb the people and render them helpless to the manipulations of various powers-that-be.

The title story, also the first in the collection, sets the tone for much of the work that follows. In this story, in order to help the incumbent leader win the upcoming election, the American government drugs the masses by slipping a mood-elevating soma into all pizza, beer, soda, and coffee. After the incumbent wins, manufacturers are instructed to stop using the drug. The nameless first-person narrator is unreliable, as a victim of the drugging, but nevertheless has insight into why the drugging was so successful:

Instead of previous generations' indigence and famine, which alters a man's spiritual core, we have split-level malls, unwanted possessions, and debt to spur our colorless discontent, a dissatisfaction so bland it inspires no moments of action, only self-loathing and fresh consumption. We absently fill ourselves beyond satiety, yet remain eternally unfulfilled. To the politicians, we were not fat and happy, but obese and despondent, obeying Newton's first law of thermodynamics. The government was the unbalancing force that acted upon us. They set us in motion for their benefit and then laid us again to rest.

The themes explored here—distrust of the government, isolation, greed, corruption, and loss—are also the focus of several of the other 21 stories. The government and corporations are also to blame in the story "Evolution," in which purification systems in cities fail to filter water properly, causing genetic mutations in the people that drink it. In "Fountain," water also causes profound changes in those that drink or wash with it. In fact, several stories explore reproductive and sexual issues: what causes people to reproduce; what makes men men and women women; what causes sexual urges.

Guz is an innovative, witty, imaginative writer. Her stories are carefully structured—some as flash, some as letters, and some as longer stories—and powerfully executed, full of provocative images and meticulously detailed explanations. "Not far from the Tree," a story that examines the rise and fall of Anna Nicole Smith, begins with the following passage, setting the stage for the celebrity's brief and surprising promise as well as her ultimate downfall:

It was an accident of genetics. Given the derisory material her father contributed to the spongy, microscopic matter awaiting invasion inside her mother, the resulting child should have looked sullen and bland, like a thin, walking hangover. Her sisters did. But something from the past spoke up. The genes of some Texas desperado or pretty saloon whore with a good chin and cheekbones must have grappled to find a place on her double helix. Her good looks were, at first, dark and ambivalent and floated slowly to her surface like a dead body in turbid water. But, by the time she was three, everyone recognized the fact that she would be pretty.

The depiction of Princess Diana in "An August Night in Paris," which imagine what she experienced the night she died, is a bit more hopeful, even as it exposes what an insidious soma the cult of celebrity can be.

On her website Guz lists Huxley and George Orwell as influences and states that American Soma pays homage to the two authors' works and ideas. Indeed it does. The stories are satiric and both frightening and amusing at the same time. In Guz's world, the American dream is just an illusion, and it's been consumed by the delusion of the soma.—Catherine Harrison