First-rate satiric novelists are rare, in part because their art is harrowing even to themselves. True satirists grow so used to seeing through pretense that after a while they begin to wonder whether anything besides pretense exists at all: Reveal the sham too many times, and pretty soon even reality looks like it’s shamming. No wonder so many of them — from Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh — suffer bouts of madness.
But even if the price is madness, we need our satirists: not the comedians for whom satire is just funny, not the writers for whom satire at the pretenses of others is a way to sell their own pretense, but our real satirists — the ones for whom humor is a moral sledgehammer with which to smash euphemism and evasion on every side. And with his mad new novel, Brain Storm, Richard Dooling has joined the ranks of the real satirists.
Brain Storm is in part a defense of free speech against the advocates of “hate-speech” codes. But the novel is also, and more ambitiously, a defense of everyday humanity against the imperial claims of science. And it is a ferociously funny book.
The clear and present danger that provoked Brain Storm is found in the writings of such people as Mari J. Matsuda, a law professor at Georgetown University and co-author of the 1993 Words That Wound, who sees nothing in free speech except hatred:
At every single university at which I spoke — north, south, east, and west — I learned of serious incidents of racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic hate. . . . The universities, long the home of institutional and euphemistic racism, were now seeing something different: the worst forms of gutter racism. Asian-American students spat on; Nazi literature appearing on Jewish holy days; and cross burnings, racist slurs, and homophobic insults so degrading and assaultive that I found I could not in good conscience reprint them, even for educational purposes, in the book I wrote on the topic.
While Matsuda was gathering information — north, south, east, and west — for her anti-free-speech manifesto, Dooling was earning his law degree. He began his career as a writer in 1992 with the novel Critical Care (made into a movie in 1997 by Sidney Lumet), and his second novel, the 1994 White Man’s Grave, earned a National Book Award nomination. In 1996, he published his own manifesto on free speech. Entitled Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech, and Sexual Harassment, it is a book brimming with words to wound, offend, and outrage — and it turns out to have been a nonfiction test-run for Brain Storm.
Set in the near future, after the expansion of laws against “hate crimes,” Brain Storm has as its hero Joe Watson, a young lawyer at the best firm in St. Louis. Happily married and the father of two children, Watson worries chiefly about the mortgage payment and how he is going to make what his father-in-law refers to as “Real Money.” In short, he is ready for a fall.
That fall comes when he is assigned a pro bono murder case — to his secret delight, in part because he actually believes that even loathsome offenders deserve competent representation, and in part because he has always longed for a classic, Perry Mason sort of courtroom showdown.
The client, a lowlife racist named James Whitlow, is accused of murdering a deaf African-American sign-language teacher he caught in bed with his wife. The young lawyer’s own wife wants him to refuse the hate-crime case, and his boss wants a quick guilty plea.
Before long, Watson has lost both wife and job. And meanwhile, a pair of thugs are asking menacing questions about a mysterious “delivery” involving Whitlow.
Keeping this plot merrily boiling, Dooling dissects the Matsuda-style doublespeak that justifies hate-crime legislation and campus speech codes while simultaneously preaching the dogma of civil liberties. (Matsuda herself is a member of the ACLU.) The novelist’s principal mouthpiece is Judge Whittaker J. Stang, in whose tyrannical presence attorneys turn to mush. “You want to make hatred illegal?” he demands in one of his many rhetorical arias. “I’ve sat up here for fifty years and seen nothing but hatred.”
As Watson prepares a defense for Whitlow, he is aided by a beautiful neuroscientist, Rachel Palmquist, a diabolical seductress with the brain of Marvin Minsky and the body of Christy Turlington. Convinced that humans are merely machines made of meat, Palmquist has the pictures to prove it — scans of the brain while the brain’s owner is engaged in various activities:
“Generalized muscular tension, perineal contractions, involuntary pelvic thrusting with a periodicity of zero-point-eight seconds, white-hot medical preoptic.” She giggled. “The lateral hypothalamus brings accessory networks into play,” she whispered. “Houston, we have bursts of impulses in the hypothalamic supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei down the axon terminals. Heart rate climbing. Skin flushed. Vasodilation. Muscle spasms. Involuntary vocalizations . . . Aaaand . . . Boom! Massive discharge of oxytocin from the posterior pituitary gland.”
He turned his head, panted, and moaned.
“Neuroscience,” she said. And kissed him.
Watson’s desire for Palmquist contends against his marital vows, his love for his wife and children, and his neglected but not abandoned Catholic faith. It also plunges him into a thicket of speculation about free will, responsibility, and what it means to be human.
The connection in Brain Storm between Dooling’s caricature of rogue neuroscience and his rage against the nanny state lies in the hubris of Palmquist and her real-life counterparts. Like those who long to make hatred illegal, Palmquist sets herself above the common run of humanity. The hopes and fears and dreams of men and women, their loves and lusts: all this she observes from an ironic distance, with an inhuman detachment and a smug sense of superiority.
Dooling possesses an insatiable appetite for news and gossip, and in the care with which he evokes Watson’s world, he reveals that he has what all first-rate satirists require: an inebriated delight in language and a perfect ear for the self-indicting turn of phrase, the bureaucratic tic, the trademark pomposity. Dooling has mastered the vocabularies of law, computers, and neuroscience, and his performance reaches beyond parody into the realm of art.
Like Swift and Waugh, like Flann O’Brien and Wyndham Lewis, Dooling is a divided soul. Most satirists have deeply conservative instincts — many of them, as it happens, are Catholics — but they inevitably end up flirting with nihilism. In the nonfiction Blue Streak, Dooling refers with apparent approval to the theory that “consciousness consists of a small swamp of neurons firing in specialized networks.” A page later, he quotes Minsky on the brain as merely “hundreds of different machines.” This sounds exactly like Rachel Palmquist in Brain Storm. Dooling can make her so persuasive because he is half-convinced that she is right.
But Dooling also knows the danger she represents. If the twentieth century was the age of political totalitarianism, the twenty-first may be the age of biological totalitarianism. And Rachel Palmquist is its prophet. Brain Storm ends happily with Joe Watson finding a way through his trials. But what remains in the reader’s mind is the image of those — like Mari Matsuda and the haters of hate-speech, like Marvin Minsky and the determiners of biological determinism — who suppose they have risen above the low estate of being merely human.
John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.
