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On Wings of Song
In a disturbing vision of the future, Daniel Weinreb leaves behind the repression and censorship of the Midwest to pursue a career in New York, despite the famine and poverty of the overpopulated East Coast
359 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published June 1, 1979
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About the author
Thomas M. Disch
372 books299 followersPoet and cynic, Thomas M. Disch brought to the sf of the New Wave a camp sensibility and a sardonicism that too much sf had lacked. His sf novels include Camp Concentration, with its colony of prisoners mutated into super-intelligence by the bacteria that will in due course kill them horribly, and On Wings of Song, in which many of the brightest and best have left their bodies for what may be genuine, or entirely illusory, astral flight and his hero has to survive until his lover comes back to him; both are stunningly original books and both are among sf's more accomplishedly bitter-sweet works.
In later years, Disch had turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want. Perhaps Thomas M. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's "Town Musicians of Bremen" featuring wornout domestic appliances -- what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical.
In later years, Disch had turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want. Perhaps Thomas M. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's "Town Musicians of Bremen" featuring wornout domestic appliances -- what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews
May 2, 2019
The human society is in the terrible decline and On Wings of Song is a kind of cultural dystopia… Thomas M. Disch writes with so many realistic details that it starts appearing that the dystopia is now…
In the evil empire, one must abide by the laws of evil… In the paradise, one must abide by the rules of God…
And recounting his story Thomas M. Disch is full of weird irony…
It looks like in the part of the States the flower children have won in their psychedelic revolution so the protagonist’s grand aspiration is to learn to fly – that is, to fly in the hippie’s sense of the word. In order to fly one must skillfully sing a song so the hero starts learning music and singing… But whatever he does he can’t fly so he is in despair…
Eventually the hero succeeds at singing properly but kitsch and pop culture hold sway…
So when the music’s over turn out the lights…
“They say we’re very conformist, don’t they?”
“Yes, that’s certainly one thing they say.”
“So why did you want to come here? I mean, aside from us.”
“Why? I want a nice, comfortable, safe, prosperous life, and if conformity’s the price I’ve got to pay, so be it. Wherever you are, you know, you’re conforming to something.”
In the evil empire, one must abide by the laws of evil… In the paradise, one must abide by the rules of God…
And recounting his story Thomas M. Disch is full of weird irony…
It looks like in the part of the States the flower children have won in their psychedelic revolution so the protagonist’s grand aspiration is to learn to fly – that is, to fly in the hippie’s sense of the word. In order to fly one must skillfully sing a song so the hero starts learning music and singing… But whatever he does he can’t fly so he is in despair…
Thirty is a bad birthday when you’ve got nothing to show for it. By then the old excuses are wearing pretty thin. A failure at thirty is likely to be a failure the rest of his life, and he knows it. But the worst of it isn’t the embarrassment, which may even do you some good in small dosages; the worst of it is the way it works its way into the cells of your body, like asbestos. You live in the constant stink of your own fear, waiting for the next major catastrophe: pyorrhea, an eviction notice, whatever.
Eventually the hero succeeds at singing properly but kitsch and pop culture hold sway…
So when the music’s over turn out the lights…
January 30, 2019
[Original review, 2010]
Thomas Disch is, in my humble opinion, the most underrated author of the last 50 years, and a reasonable number of people consider this to be his best novel. You'll gather that it's quite good. I read it not long after it came out, and have re-read it a couple of times since then.
Like many of Disch's books, Wings uses an SF framework to make a point about society and religion. In his dystopian future US, life has been transformed by the invention of a device which, in principle, allows anyone to have a transcendental spiritual experience. You hook yourself up to the machine, and sing in a particular way. Somehow, the singing brings the two halves of your brain into perfect balance, and the machine does the rest: it liberates your astral projection, which is then free to depart where it will. The body is left alive, but without consciousness, and needs to be tended. Usually, the spirit returns to its body after a few days, but some spirits never return.
The invention has split the country, roughly down the red/blue faultline. In some states, everything that has to do with music is strictly forbidden. In others, people believe that access to "flying", as it is called, is an inalienable right. The hero has a complicated life, living in both types of environment. He starts off in repressive Iowa, where flying is an illegal activity, but later moves to New York, where it's permitted. He wants to learn to fly, but it doesn't quite work for him. He does all the right things, he takes singing lessons from masters, but despite all his efforts he can't liberate his astral projection.
He does, however, become a gifted singer. He starts giving concerts, where he is hooked up to a flying rig. He pretends he's flying to please his fans, who are taken in. One day, at a concert, a deranged religious fanatic shoots him while he is hooked up to the rig, and the display is showing him flying. He's instantly killed.
The story is told in a low-key, matter-of-fact way, and another reviewer here complains that it isn't as overtly brilliant as Camp Concentration and 334. That's true. But I've thought about it, on and off, ever since I first read it. Surely "flying" must symbolize something, but what? Is it drugs? sex? alternative lifestyles? spiritual growth in general? Somehow, I can't put my finger on it. Nothing quite seems to fit.
And what does the ending mean? That if we keep putting off the truly important thing, one day we'll suddenly discover it's too late? That he finally managed to fly for real, and that's exactly when he was killed? That no one except him ever knew whether he was faking as usual during his last performance, or whether he did have the experience he'd been seeking all his life?
I thought about these questions again today while we were having a walk, and as usual I couldn't decide.
_______________________
[Update, Jan 30 2019]
Your random fact for today: Michel Houellebecq is another Disch fan! There is a good half page in Sérotonine saying how underrated he is and how sad it was that he killed himself.
Thomas Disch is, in my humble opinion, the most underrated author of the last 50 years, and a reasonable number of people consider this to be his best novel. You'll gather that it's quite good. I read it not long after it came out, and have re-read it a couple of times since then.
Like many of Disch's books, Wings uses an SF framework to make a point about society and religion. In his dystopian future US, life has been transformed by the invention of a device which, in principle, allows anyone to have a transcendental spiritual experience. You hook yourself up to the machine, and sing in a particular way. Somehow, the singing brings the two halves of your brain into perfect balance, and the machine does the rest: it liberates your astral projection, which is then free to depart where it will. The body is left alive, but without consciousness, and needs to be tended. Usually, the spirit returns to its body after a few days, but some spirits never return.
The invention has split the country, roughly down the red/blue faultline. In some states, everything that has to do with music is strictly forbidden. In others, people believe that access to "flying", as it is called, is an inalienable right. The hero has a complicated life, living in both types of environment. He starts off in repressive Iowa, where flying is an illegal activity, but later moves to New York, where it's permitted. He wants to learn to fly, but it doesn't quite work for him. He does all the right things, he takes singing lessons from masters, but despite all his efforts he can't liberate his astral projection.
He does, however, become a gifted singer. He starts giving concerts, where he is hooked up to a flying rig. He pretends he's flying to please his fans, who are taken in. One day, at a concert, a deranged religious fanatic shoots him while he is hooked up to the rig, and the display is showing him flying. He's instantly killed.
The story is told in a low-key, matter-of-fact way, and another reviewer here complains that it isn't as overtly brilliant as Camp Concentration and 334. That's true. But I've thought about it, on and off, ever since I first read it. Surely "flying" must symbolize something, but what? Is it drugs? sex? alternative lifestyles? spiritual growth in general? Somehow, I can't put my finger on it. Nothing quite seems to fit.
And what does the ending mean? That if we keep putting off the truly important thing, one day we'll suddenly discover it's too late? That he finally managed to fly for real, and that's exactly when he was killed? That no one except him ever knew whether he was faking as usual during his last performance, or whether he did have the experience he'd been seeking all his life?
I thought about these questions again today while we were having a walk, and as usual I couldn't decide.
_______________________
[Update, Jan 30 2019]
Your random fact for today: Michel Houellebecq is another Disch fan! There is a good half page in Sérotonine saying how underrated he is and how sad it was that he killed himself.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 10, 2024
Check out my full, spoiler free, video review HERE. While the dystopian plot of this novel is interesting, I feel like this one is all about the themes and unique writing. The US is split up and governed by different political parties (more or less) and resources are scarce. The act of ‘Flying’ (singing in a certain way while hooked up to a machine) is also partially responsible for dividing the country. The main character Daniel comes from a religious/conservative part of the country and over time becomes obsessed with flying, or at least trying to. It seems ‘flying’ is a metaphor used for artistic transcendence, but I could be off here. This is a coming-of-age story that is at times; cynical, angry, dark, satirical, beautiful, poetic, horrific, funny and heartbreaking, among other emotions. Knowing a bit about Disch, it’s hard not to see how much of himself went into this one. A bit overlong towards the ending but still highly recommended.
August 7, 2008
Thomas Disch's On Wings of Song is a multi-layered, interesting novel because it addresses issues of power (familial, governmental, disciplinary), the value of art, the relationship between mind (or soul) and body, and the relationship between appearance and reality.
Power: The protagonist, Daniel Weinreb, has grown up in the repressive society of Iowa. While still a teenager he is arrested for selling forbidden out-of-state newspapers and is sent to jail where he nearly freezes and starves because the prisoners are essentially left to fend for themselves, prevented from running away by having a bomb implanted in them that will explode if they cross the perimeter of the prison. Daniel encounters abuses of power within the prison, within the government and school systems, and in the family of his girlfriend, Boadicea, as her father, a wealthy leader of the community, manipulates the world to his liking. This issue is dealt with directly by Disch. He shows us how pervasive abuses of power are while never leading us to believe that they are completely inescapable or unchangeable.
Art: One major means to escape these abuses is art, specifically singing, and flight. In this world, there are machines that allow those hooked into them to sing their way out of their bodies and into a transcendent state of being. Daniel describes this experience: "The moment one leaves one's body by the power of song, the lips fall silent, but the song goes on, and so long as one flies the song continues" (357). Boadicea, far more intimately acquainted with flight, also describes it: "What other choice can there be, after all [but to fly]? It is, as my father might say, a business proposition. Here one finds, at most, only a little pleasure; there, there is only pleasure. Here, if my body perishes, I must perish with it; when I am there, the body's death will cease to concern me" (332). At first, singing is only meaningful to Daniel as a means to learn to fly. As the narrative progresses, however, singing becomes its only reward. He reaches the point where he could fly while singing, but he chooses not to.
Body & Soul: But why, after a lifetime of wanting nothing more than to fly, why does he choose not to fly once he is able to? Why not abandon the body, the meat, the flesh, that which is accompanied by pain and embarrassment and failure? Why not soar into this transcendent space? A conversation with Mrs. Schiff, a composer and supporter of the arts as well as his roommate for a time, may begin to answer these questions. She tells him,
"Merely to be striving, ever and always, is no distinction. That's what's wrong with German music. It's all development, all Sehnsucht and impatience. The highest art is happy to inhabit this moment, here and now. A great singer sings the way a bird warbles. One doesn't need a large soul to warble, only a throat" (286-7).
In this light, singing is its own end and its own reward. This realization is also, however, the key to flight. Daniel says later,
"It was as Mrs. Schiff had said about music, that it must be a warbling, and willing to inhabit this instant, and then this instant, and always this instant, and not just willing, and not even desirous, but delighted: an endless, seamless inebriation of song. That was what bel canto was all about, and that was the way to fly." (292)
The equation of bel canto [beautiful singing] with flight does more than reinforce the necessity of singing to take one into flight here; it also places bel canto on the same level as flight. In Daniel's mind, bel canto is at this point no longer a means to the end of flight, but an experience as transcendent and meaningful as he'd always hoped flight would be. He acknowledges, during his final concert, that "he was willing, at last, that this [singing] should be his life, his only life. If it were small, that was a part of its charm" (355).
Finally, he chooses not to fly but instead to sing because, as he tells his brother-in-law, "When you're out of your body that long, you stop being altogether human" (355). Although the novel diminishes the body for hundreds of pages, putting a premium on the escape from it, in the end Disch puts the highest value on the full human experience, both body and mind/soul, and on the aesthetic experience, which is able to make people understand:
"It took hold of each soul so, levelling them all to ashes with a single breath, like the breath of atomic disintegration, joining them in the communion of an intolerable and lovely knowledge, which was the song and could not be told of apart from the song" (70).
Appearance & Reality: Perhaps the central theme, that which brings all the others together is that of the relationship between appearance and reality. Daniel repeatedly is told and learns the lesson that reality is created by one's actions. In other words, if you pretend something is true, it is true or will become true. His mother pretends to be a normal Iowan housewife and eventually becomes one; Grandison Whiting, Boa's father, pretends to be larger and more confident than he is (with a fake beard) and eventually becomes a powerful individual who is feared and respected by the entire community; Van Dyke, a Christian speaker and writer, says, "if the way we become the kind of people we are is by pretending, then the way to become good, devout, and faithful Christians (which, admit it, is a well-nigh impossible undertaking) is to pretend to be good, devout, and faithful" (57); Daniel pretends to be black (which is a whole fascinating subplot in and of itself), pretends to be in love with a castrato (another fascinating subplot), and, finally, pretends to fly and these acts create a new self, open new doors for him, and free him to truly sing. Even in Daniel's final performance, he does not actually fly (though he knows he could); instead he pretends to fly. He has made his decision to value the here and now instead of striving for something outside of his body and his self and so he will not fly, but even in this refusal he reinforces the strength and significance of his singing by acting the part of the man having a transcendent experience of flight. The act is, in many ways, the reality.
This truth is an ambivalent one, however, when it comes to the question of flight. If appearances create reality, should not flight be the ultimate reality where what you think you see is more real than the real world? On the other hand, the mechanism of flight requires the appearance of death for the physical body, which creates a different reality altogether.
But--and here's the crux of the matter--the appearance is not the same as the act. Daniel, his mother, Grandison, and Van Dyke do not merely appear to be what they wish to be; they act like the thing they wish to be. It is an active process not a passive one and one that requires an embodied subject, which is something that is impossible in flight. For Daniel, finally, singing trumps flight because in it he is complete, both body and soul, as well as part of a larger community. Boa chooses flight over "real life" and has a very different experience: she experiences pleasure but she is incomplete and isolated by the experience. She does not grow, but only finds a delightful stasis.
Power: The protagonist, Daniel Weinreb, has grown up in the repressive society of Iowa. While still a teenager he is arrested for selling forbidden out-of-state newspapers and is sent to jail where he nearly freezes and starves because the prisoners are essentially left to fend for themselves, prevented from running away by having a bomb implanted in them that will explode if they cross the perimeter of the prison. Daniel encounters abuses of power within the prison, within the government and school systems, and in the family of his girlfriend, Boadicea, as her father, a wealthy leader of the community, manipulates the world to his liking. This issue is dealt with directly by Disch. He shows us how pervasive abuses of power are while never leading us to believe that they are completely inescapable or unchangeable.
Art: One major means to escape these abuses is art, specifically singing, and flight. In this world, there are machines that allow those hooked into them to sing their way out of their bodies and into a transcendent state of being. Daniel describes this experience: "The moment one leaves one's body by the power of song, the lips fall silent, but the song goes on, and so long as one flies the song continues" (357). Boadicea, far more intimately acquainted with flight, also describes it: "What other choice can there be, after all [but to fly]? It is, as my father might say, a business proposition. Here one finds, at most, only a little pleasure; there, there is only pleasure. Here, if my body perishes, I must perish with it; when I am there, the body's death will cease to concern me" (332). At first, singing is only meaningful to Daniel as a means to learn to fly. As the narrative progresses, however, singing becomes its only reward. He reaches the point where he could fly while singing, but he chooses not to.
Body & Soul: But why, after a lifetime of wanting nothing more than to fly, why does he choose not to fly once he is able to? Why not abandon the body, the meat, the flesh, that which is accompanied by pain and embarrassment and failure? Why not soar into this transcendent space? A conversation with Mrs. Schiff, a composer and supporter of the arts as well as his roommate for a time, may begin to answer these questions. She tells him,
"Merely to be striving, ever and always, is no distinction. That's what's wrong with German music. It's all development, all Sehnsucht and impatience. The highest art is happy to inhabit this moment, here and now. A great singer sings the way a bird warbles. One doesn't need a large soul to warble, only a throat" (286-7).
In this light, singing is its own end and its own reward. This realization is also, however, the key to flight. Daniel says later,
"It was as Mrs. Schiff had said about music, that it must be a warbling, and willing to inhabit this instant, and then this instant, and always this instant, and not just willing, and not even desirous, but delighted: an endless, seamless inebriation of song. That was what bel canto was all about, and that was the way to fly." (292)
The equation of bel canto [beautiful singing] with flight does more than reinforce the necessity of singing to take one into flight here; it also places bel canto on the same level as flight. In Daniel's mind, bel canto is at this point no longer a means to the end of flight, but an experience as transcendent and meaningful as he'd always hoped flight would be. He acknowledges, during his final concert, that "he was willing, at last, that this [singing] should be his life, his only life. If it were small, that was a part of its charm" (355).
Finally, he chooses not to fly but instead to sing because, as he tells his brother-in-law, "When you're out of your body that long, you stop being altogether human" (355). Although the novel diminishes the body for hundreds of pages, putting a premium on the escape from it, in the end Disch puts the highest value on the full human experience, both body and mind/soul, and on the aesthetic experience, which is able to make people understand:
"It took hold of each soul so, levelling them all to ashes with a single breath, like the breath of atomic disintegration, joining them in the communion of an intolerable and lovely knowledge, which was the song and could not be told of apart from the song" (70).
Appearance & Reality: Perhaps the central theme, that which brings all the others together is that of the relationship between appearance and reality. Daniel repeatedly is told and learns the lesson that reality is created by one's actions. In other words, if you pretend something is true, it is true or will become true. His mother pretends to be a normal Iowan housewife and eventually becomes one; Grandison Whiting, Boa's father, pretends to be larger and more confident than he is (with a fake beard) and eventually becomes a powerful individual who is feared and respected by the entire community; Van Dyke, a Christian speaker and writer, says, "if the way we become the kind of people we are is by pretending, then the way to become good, devout, and faithful Christians (which, admit it, is a well-nigh impossible undertaking) is to pretend to be good, devout, and faithful" (57); Daniel pretends to be black (which is a whole fascinating subplot in and of itself), pretends to be in love with a castrato (another fascinating subplot), and, finally, pretends to fly and these acts create a new self, open new doors for him, and free him to truly sing. Even in Daniel's final performance, he does not actually fly (though he knows he could); instead he pretends to fly. He has made his decision to value the here and now instead of striving for something outside of his body and his self and so he will not fly, but even in this refusal he reinforces the strength and significance of his singing by acting the part of the man having a transcendent experience of flight. The act is, in many ways, the reality.
This truth is an ambivalent one, however, when it comes to the question of flight. If appearances create reality, should not flight be the ultimate reality where what you think you see is more real than the real world? On the other hand, the mechanism of flight requires the appearance of death for the physical body, which creates a different reality altogether.
But--and here's the crux of the matter--the appearance is not the same as the act. Daniel, his mother, Grandison, and Van Dyke do not merely appear to be what they wish to be; they act like the thing they wish to be. It is an active process not a passive one and one that requires an embodied subject, which is something that is impossible in flight. For Daniel, finally, singing trumps flight because in it he is complete, both body and soul, as well as part of a larger community. Boa chooses flight over "real life" and has a very different experience: she experiences pleasure but she is incomplete and isolated by the experience. She does not grow, but only finds a delightful stasis.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 24, 2023
This was a puzzling novel, which, I suppose, is a credit to its originality. Even so, it reminded me greatly of Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, its point being mostly to point out that narrative and life are pretty much incompatible, or, as Al Stewart's great song inspired by the latter novel puts it, "I was the victim of a series of accidents / As are we all." Consequently, the "plot" here reads a bit like a picaresque journey through the slow collapse of the late stages of post-industrial capitalism, its primary surprise being how easily everyone accepts the apocalypse and just struggles on. Although this is perhaps a great truth, it dawns on the reader quite slowly as you go, so the text itself is kind of sweeter in the reader's post-reading ruminations than in the actual process of reading what seems to be a rather plotless series of events. (I've heard this said of the old Monty Python's Flying Circus TV show as well, that it's far funnier when repeating the sketches to and with your friends rather than in the puzzling moment of first viewing such shenanigans.)
Along the way there are some perspicaciously absurd satires of certain American proclivities--our primitive native post-puritanical and nearly fascist Christianity, race relations, the marginalization/fetishization of the arts, our oddly moral approach to life in general--including hustling and crime, etc. All of this was quite delicious really, but also pretty clearly not the point--again, in a novel whose point seems to be that there really isn't much of a point. Even the ecstasy of flight, which would appear at first a possible point of reference, is ultimately described as appearing utterly banal from the outside, as if it were only a continual state of pleasure completely without value from any sort of exterior viewpoint, thus mere hedonism. This leads me to question my own American post-puritan morality, and that, perhaps, is the point after all.
One certain praise I can give is that, even after 40+ years since the novel's composition, its vision of the future is without a single contradiction yet and thus is still quite possible, so it hasn't at all dated since 1979. That's rather remarkable.
Along the way there are some perspicaciously absurd satires of certain American proclivities--our primitive native post-puritanical and nearly fascist Christianity, race relations, the marginalization/fetishization of the arts, our oddly moral approach to life in general--including hustling and crime, etc. All of this was quite delicious really, but also pretty clearly not the point--again, in a novel whose point seems to be that there really isn't much of a point. Even the ecstasy of flight, which would appear at first a possible point of reference, is ultimately described as appearing utterly banal from the outside, as if it were only a continual state of pleasure completely without value from any sort of exterior viewpoint, thus mere hedonism. This leads me to question my own American post-puritan morality, and that, perhaps, is the point after all.
One certain praise I can give is that, even after 40+ years since the novel's composition, its vision of the future is without a single contradiction yet and thus is still quite possible, so it hasn't at all dated since 1979. That's rather remarkable.
November 7, 2020
Disch. Disch. Disch.
When other writers mention Thomas Disch, underrated is a word that usually comes up. Underrated is an understatement. He's truly one of the best in the genre (SF, horror, fantasy). He's in the pantheon of my favorite writers. Genre was just a word to him. Thankfully.
In this novel, he expands a narrative to encompass a main character's life who moves from the wide-eyed and innocent - to a teenage prisoner whose offense was selling out-of-state newspapers in the state of Iowa - to a hustler on the streets of Manhattan - to a celebrity who revives Opera to the masses, singing Bel Canto while dressed in blackface.
Some say Disch's cynicism and bountiful wit weigh down his novels. That's an absurd observation in my eyes. Disch truly is a storyteller. And his dystopians ring true. There's nothing absurd about them. I tend to roll my eyes at the word 'Dickensian' but Disch (as he did with his horror novel, 'The M.D.") truly writes with a fast-moving, thoughtful scope.
It really is a beautiful fucking novel. And I never thought I'd cry reading a book about people's spirits turning into interstellar faeries, leaving the husks of their mortal bodies behind.
(the only negative of this book is the cover art - shit, what a total misstep)
When other writers mention Thomas Disch, underrated is a word that usually comes up. Underrated is an understatement. He's truly one of the best in the genre (SF, horror, fantasy). He's in the pantheon of my favorite writers. Genre was just a word to him. Thankfully.
In this novel, he expands a narrative to encompass a main character's life who moves from the wide-eyed and innocent - to a teenage prisoner whose offense was selling out-of-state newspapers in the state of Iowa - to a hustler on the streets of Manhattan - to a celebrity who revives Opera to the masses, singing Bel Canto while dressed in blackface.
Some say Disch's cynicism and bountiful wit weigh down his novels. That's an absurd observation in my eyes. Disch truly is a storyteller. And his dystopians ring true. There's nothing absurd about them. I tend to roll my eyes at the word 'Dickensian' but Disch (as he did with his horror novel, 'The M.D.") truly writes with a fast-moving, thoughtful scope.
It really is a beautiful fucking novel. And I never thought I'd cry reading a book about people's spirits turning into interstellar faeries, leaving the husks of their mortal bodies behind.
(the only negative of this book is the cover art - shit, what a total misstep)
April 1, 2016
This is an odd book. If I recounted the entire plot, you would think I was on drugs. It swerved back and forth from fairly horrific dystopia to comedy to fantasy to what seemed like, but turned out not to be, a gay coming-out story. It's set in the future, where there is ample political repression, but it's worse in some states than others. Iowa is highly repressed, Minnesota much less so. The whole East Coast is in a decline, sending dentist Abraham Weinrib and his young son Daniel to Iowa. The mother has abandoned them, but she shows up five years later and all their lives continue on as if nothing remarkable happened. Teenage Daniel has a paper route, but in Iowa this particular newspaper turns out to be obscene and seditious and he is sent to prison. There are no fences, gates, or razorwire; everyone is fitted with a stomach lozenge containing a plastic explosive that will be detonated by radio waves if one ventures beyond the confines of the prison yard.
After his release from prison (the Supreme Court has overruled Iowa's seditious newspaper law), Daniel marries a wealthy young woman named Boadicea. (Her father offers her hand in marriage after he has secretly watched them having sex.) On their honeymoon, they attempt to fly; some people are able to fly if they sing songs in a highly meaningful way. Their souls leave their bodies and fly around, sometimes rejoining their bodies, sometimes not. Boadicea is able to fly, but Daniel, who has wanted desperately to fly for years, is not.
At this point, Disch goes haywire and brings in insanity belts (chastity belts for men), castrati, people called "phoneys" who dye their skin black (short for faux noirs) except for one pinky so people will know they're not actually black. Food rationing is severe, so Daniel and the elderly woman whose apartment he shares concoct a delicious bread pudding made of dog food, Hyprotine powder, and artificial sweetener.
There's a Donald Trump connection. (What??) Yes. In prison, a former music teacher sends Daniel a book by a Reverend Van Dyke titled The Product is God, which advises uncertain devotees to deeply pretend to be Christian. This will be just as good as being so. Van Dyke is a preacher at The Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, "founded in 1628, ...one of the oldest continuous Protestant congregations in North America" according to Wikipedia. What real life minister was pastor of Marble Collegiate Church for 52 years? That would be Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the enormous bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking. Trump's parents attended the church, and apparently Trump did as a youngster, or at least he claims he did. “Donald Trump has had a longstanding history with Marble Collegiate Church, where his parents were for years active members and one of his children was baptized. However, as he indicates, he is a Presbyterian, and is not an active member of Marble,” the church clarified last August.
“Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ was my pastor,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday. “To this day one of the great speakers I’ve seen. You hated to leave church. You hated when the sermon was over. That’s how great he was at Marble Collegiate Church.” Now I'm convinced Trump never heard Peale speak.
November 19, 2018
"...Disch has rendered our present provincialism, conformity, commercialism, frivolity, intolerance, and narcissism."
This novel seems more pertinent today than it did in the 1970s, or perhaps I am more awake. It's a coming of age story commenting on the decay and inequities of Western Civilization.
NEW WORD: lalochezia (n.) the emotional relief gained from using abusive or profane language
This novel seems more pertinent today than it did in the 1970s, or perhaps I am more awake. It's a coming of age story commenting on the decay and inequities of Western Civilization.
NEW WORD: lalochezia (n.) the emotional relief gained from using abusive or profane language
June 21, 2023
This is my first dish of Disch, and while I wasn't completely blown away storywise, I enjoyed this novel a lot, mainly on the strength of the writing. Disch is an impressive prose stylist—particularly for working in a genre that is not known for a preponderance of great prose stylists—so I think given different subject matter, I might find some of his other writings more to my taste.
Light on the sci-fi, On Wings of Song is rather more of a "path of the artist" tale like The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (a writer that Disch has expressed admiration for) set in a near-future 21st-Century America where the midwestern states are idyllic yet repressive religious-right strongholds that consider the relatively uninhibited eastern cities immoral, decadent, ruinous hellholes. Well, did this ever ring some bells of recognition.
Despite some blackface silliness in the second half, Disch was a remarkably prescient writer who had a good understanding of the rise of religious conservatism and the fracturing of the country into the "two Americas," which frankly doesn't seem to be getting any better lately. Hm, yes, it certainly would be nice to just fly away on wings of song.
Light on the sci-fi, On Wings of Song is rather more of a "path of the artist" tale like The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (a writer that Disch has expressed admiration for) set in a near-future 21st-Century America where the midwestern states are idyllic yet repressive religious-right strongholds that consider the relatively uninhibited eastern cities immoral, decadent, ruinous hellholes. Well, did this ever ring some bells of recognition.
Despite some blackface silliness in the second half, Disch was a remarkably prescient writer who had a good understanding of the rise of religious conservatism and the fracturing of the country into the "two Americas," which frankly doesn't seem to be getting any better lately. Hm, yes, it certainly would be nice to just fly away on wings of song.
September 13, 2008
wonderful. shelved in sci-fi, but is among the best of all american novels published in the 70s. RIP, Tom Disch
March 16, 2022
Dystopian Bildungsroman Tale of A Young Man Growing Up Amid Religious Parochialism, Yearning to Fly, Finding Love, Lured into the Seedy Theatre Life of NY, and Selling Himself for His Art
This story is most definitely autobiographical in inspiration, if not in plot details. Daniel Weinreb is a dentist's son growing up in deeply religious and totalitarian Ames, Iowa, in a near-future US beset by poverty, hunger, social collapse, and division. It's not a happy place, and despite his sensitive nature, Daniel finds himself unjustly thrown into jail just for delivering a prohibited newspaper. Jail life is truly oppressive, as they don't even feed prisoners enough to survive without resorted to help from outside, with the idea that prison should be so unpleasant that nobody will seek it over life outside, to prevent recidivism and dissuade repeat offenders.
In prison he hears the angelic voice of a man who sings so beautifully that he decides then and there that his one ambition is to become a singer in the big city, and in this world singing with the aid of a special device can actually transport you out of body into an ephemeral but blissful existence as a fairy, free to roam the world and indeed outer space, often never to return to your desiccated body again.
He finds love with the daughter of a wealthy businessman who truly believes that wealth comes to those that earn and deserve it, and that the poor are to blame for their failure and misery, a classic Republican meritocracy and anti-welfare attitude.
He later finds himself in New York, full of tawdry glitz, theater glamour, and loads of powerful people happy to exploit young and naive young men and women lured to the city. He finds work at a theatre, bringing him closer to his beloved music, but the escape through song remains every out of reach, and tantalizing. He also becomes the catamite of a famous singer, changing his appearance drastically in the bargain, again hoping that selling himself this way will bring his dream closer to reality.
This bittersweet story has some very powerful allegorical elements that map well to an aspiring writer who is also homosexual, living in NY, ever striving to achieve recognition and greatness, but also having to face the reality that he needs to sell himself (not so literally) in order to survive, perhaps writing SF that is not his true passion, and also being exploited by those more powerful and ruthless. It is brutally honest about how the world is an unforgiving place for dreamers, but the one difference and SF conceit is that you literally can escape from the material world and find eternal bliss as a fairy, if only you can find that perfect song to transport you. The tragedy of course is that the author never did find this song, as he failed to achieve financial success as a SF writer, and much later produced some horror-themed books instead, and after his partner died he later committed suicide, suggesting that he never achieved that longed-for dream and was painfully aware of it.
This story is most definitely autobiographical in inspiration, if not in plot details. Daniel Weinreb is a dentist's son growing up in deeply religious and totalitarian Ames, Iowa, in a near-future US beset by poverty, hunger, social collapse, and division. It's not a happy place, and despite his sensitive nature, Daniel finds himself unjustly thrown into jail just for delivering a prohibited newspaper. Jail life is truly oppressive, as they don't even feed prisoners enough to survive without resorted to help from outside, with the idea that prison should be so unpleasant that nobody will seek it over life outside, to prevent recidivism and dissuade repeat offenders.
In prison he hears the angelic voice of a man who sings so beautifully that he decides then and there that his one ambition is to become a singer in the big city, and in this world singing with the aid of a special device can actually transport you out of body into an ephemeral but blissful existence as a fairy, free to roam the world and indeed outer space, often never to return to your desiccated body again.
He finds love with the daughter of a wealthy businessman who truly believes that wealth comes to those that earn and deserve it, and that the poor are to blame for their failure and misery, a classic Republican meritocracy and anti-welfare attitude.
He later finds himself in New York, full of tawdry glitz, theater glamour, and loads of powerful people happy to exploit young and naive young men and women lured to the city. He finds work at a theatre, bringing him closer to his beloved music, but the escape through song remains every out of reach, and tantalizing. He also becomes the catamite of a famous singer, changing his appearance drastically in the bargain, again hoping that selling himself this way will bring his dream closer to reality.
This bittersweet story has some very powerful allegorical elements that map well to an aspiring writer who is also homosexual, living in NY, ever striving to achieve recognition and greatness, but also having to face the reality that he needs to sell himself (not so literally) in order to survive, perhaps writing SF that is not his true passion, and also being exploited by those more powerful and ruthless. It is brutally honest about how the world is an unforgiving place for dreamers, but the one difference and SF conceit is that you literally can escape from the material world and find eternal bliss as a fairy, if only you can find that perfect song to transport you. The tragedy of course is that the author never did find this song, as he failed to achieve financial success as a SF writer, and much later produced some horror-themed books instead, and after his partner died he later committed suicide, suggesting that he never achieved that longed-for dream and was painfully aware of it.
Read
October 1, 2021Recently I discovered that after "renovation" a local library got rid of all of one of my favorite author's (R.A. Lafferty) books. So immediately I checked out this book whose cover has haunted me forever. Because if Lafferty's gone, some other random and obscure science fiction novel with blackface on the cover can't be long for the chopping block (not that Lafferty's covers had blackface on them but I digress).
Well, what a strange, strange book. Like a Lafferty, I don't think it really wants to be scifi, although unlike him this one would seem to fit squarely in the "magical realism" genre, i.e., respectable scifi. Sometimes I wanted more background on the world- not so much on the flying machines, which I could take for granted, but on the prevalence of blackface (which didn't show up until 2/3rds of the way through, leaving me for awhile thinking the cover was just some artist's weird interpretation). America being America, I think one has to tread carefully when tackling a taboo like that one, and because of the lack of background on its resurgence, how it could at all be possible, it became the one fantastical-futurical-satirical element I couldn't believe in, and like one domino block falling it started to effect my belief in others. Indeed, there were times when I wondered if this book even wanted to be a scifi, what was gained by it being scifi, if it couldn't have been better if all scifi elements were removed, save, of course, the flying.
I did find it gripping, breezing through it at a fairly prodigious pace for me. That's not to say I liked everything. I guess I can sometimes grow tired of constantly being introduced to eccentric set-piece characters who really serve no purpose, and sometimes Disch's abstruse vocabulary, which had me looking up the meaning of words on almost every page, infuriated me. Sometimes I wondered if this was all just some bizarre send-up of The Jazz Singer . But like the other Disch books I've read, I would recommend it for those looking for an offbeat, sophisticated read.
"He kept thinking of the mixing bowl that the potato salad had come in. Something about its shape or its color seemed to sum up everything he'd ever loved. And lost forever."
Well, what a strange, strange book. Like a Lafferty, I don't think it really wants to be scifi, although unlike him this one would seem to fit squarely in the "magical realism" genre, i.e., respectable scifi. Sometimes I wanted more background on the world- not so much on the flying machines, which I could take for granted, but on the prevalence of blackface (which didn't show up until 2/3rds of the way through, leaving me for awhile thinking the cover was just some artist's weird interpretation). America being America, I think one has to tread carefully when tackling a taboo like that one, and because of the lack of background on its resurgence, how it could at all be possible, it became the one fantastical-futurical-satirical element I couldn't believe in, and like one domino block falling it started to effect my belief in others. Indeed, there were times when I wondered if this book even wanted to be a scifi, what was gained by it being scifi, if it couldn't have been better if all scifi elements were removed, save, of course, the flying.
I did find it gripping, breezing through it at a fairly prodigious pace for me. That's not to say I liked everything. I guess I can sometimes grow tired of constantly being introduced to eccentric set-piece characters who really serve no purpose, and sometimes Disch's abstruse vocabulary, which had me looking up the meaning of words on almost every page, infuriated me. Sometimes I wondered if this was all just some bizarre send-up of The Jazz Singer . But like the other Disch books I've read, I would recommend it for those looking for an offbeat, sophisticated read.
"He kept thinking of the mixing bowl that the potato salad had come in. Something about its shape or its color seemed to sum up everything he'd ever loved. And lost forever."
January 12, 2023
Imagine a future America where parts of the country are essentially ruled by ultraconservative Christians while at the same time people discovered that by singing passionately enough they could literally project their souls from their bodies, kind of like "American Idol" if the prize was transcendence instead of Kelly Clarkson's career. Well, keep in mind this book was written in the late seventies so that the second part is more the fantasy and the first part is the situation over the past year or two that we'd rather wish didn't seem to be happening. But hey, maybe they both seemed farfetched when he wrote it! At least I hoped it seemed farfetched to him but I think perhaps events have perhaps revealed Thomas Disch as maybe a bit too optimistic?
As probably many people before me have pointed out, Disch is the same person who wrote both "Camp Concentration" and "The Brave Little Toaster" and a quite a few other things besides. I always think of him as a SF writer because that's how encountered him ("Camp Concentration" is good but "334", a series of vignettes about an apartment complex in the future of 2025, is something else entirely and I hope never goes out of print) but the truth is the SF portion of his career by the end was a just small subset of decades of literary/theatre reviews, poetry, fantasy, and horror (I'm pretty sure "The M.D." sold decently well) though he probably never really escaped the label of "The SF guy who sometimes writes other stuff." One of the smartest writers to work in the genre, his style wasn't for everyone but when it worked, boy howdy did it work.
This one didn't hit me like "334" did (very little would, but then I also encountered that book in college so it was probably somewhat formative for me) but it sure hit the critics hard, garnering a wide range of praise and awards almost out of proportion to how obscure its become. I had forgotten he had even written this until I encountered it in my stack but at the time critics fell all over it, with Harold Bloom even listing it in his "Western Canon" and David Pringle including it as one of SF's hundred best novels. It won the John W Campbell Aware and was nominated for basically everything else but these days its out of print and even before Disch's death in 2008 (sadly, he died of suicide, having lost his partner of thirty years in 2005) it had fallen into a bit of obscurity . . . my copy is from 2003 and it doesn't seem like it was in print again for very long.
You could say its just a case of tastes changing or a book just being massively overpraised before coming back down to earth but here it does seem to be one of those instances where critics were readier for this book than audiences were. Something I find interesting is how sneaky it is in its premise . . . we're introduced to Daniel Weinreb, a boy growing up in good ol' Iowa. When we meet him his mother had run off, leaving him and his dentist father to fend for themselves (she eventually comes back, which is when we get the first references to "flying") and its only very gradually that we get the idea that something is odd in the state of Iowa. Daniel is a young child when we first encounter him and so we don't get a sitdown lesson in the recent history of the US, meaning you have to pick up stuff from context. It’s a subtle approach but it also tends to keep things at a slight distance so its hard to really get a handle on how much life has changed. But then, everyone seems miserable which is a familiar feeling the last few years.
So without putting all the changes front and center like "The Handmaid's Tale" and a plethora of near-dystopias you're left with what amounts to a coming of age tale against a backdrop of everything falling apart, a young man surrounded by people who for the most part are just as terribly off as he is . . . no one seems sure how things have gotten here and frankly no one is in a position to do anything about it anyway. So Daniel kind of blunders along with his life like any kid, testing boundaries until one day he gets a little too close to a boundary and it decides to bite back.
The book does a little shift at that point, going from a place where the previous "boy, being in Iowa sort of sucks" is replaced by "Holy crap, being in Iowa really sucks for me personally". Daniel spends some time in prison and again, much as you want to blame Ugly Future Iowa for how bad this section of the book is, prisons right now still have forced labor so its not like Disch is giving us much of a stretch here. But comes into focus here is Daniel's increasing fascination with the concept of flying, something that becomes, if not an obsession, at least a Top Three concern for him going forward all the way through to the end of the book. He learns more about how it works and discovers that it requires to some extent a good singing voice (which he does not have) and beyond that, a real surge of feeling to accompany lifting one's voice, like karaoke taken to off the charts level of passion, only it doesn't necessarily require an audience. Imagine being a legend in your own mind and then somehow doubling that image. Maybe, then, possibly, you two can fly.
Yes, it’s a metaphor (and though the book has LGBTQ themes, its not the secret story of Disch's coming out . . . if nothing else he had been out for ten years by the time this was written) and if the book seems to stumble its in how to exactly handle the whole idea of flying . . . at times it seems to lean toward the whole concept as a representation of everyone's desire to get away from this terrible world and other moments it mostly focuses on Daniel's inability to fly as a symbol of his distance from his fellow human beings. Which means it kind of hovers in the background without really taking center stage and when it starts to inch a bit more into view its unclear what real purpose it serves. Replace "flying" with, I don't know, "wanting to live in Hawaii" and I'm not sure how much different the book would be. Daniel doesn't seem to be the only person who can't fly but he seems to be the only person who cares quite a bit about it to not be able to do it, which leads to some interesting life choices along the way.
What this is that for all intents and purposes the book becomes a sort of a parade of Daniel trying to make the best out of things going wrong all the time. After prison he falls in love withe the daughter of a local rich guy (who doesn't automatically hate him! but rest assured he's not a benevolent rich guy) which goes not terribly until flying enters the picture again and suddenly Daniel is on his own in New York City, mostly broke and under a different name (though not for the reasons you might think). And what do you do when you're down and out in NYC . . . why, go into the theatre, of course. But again, not the way you might think.
By this point in the book you've either agreed to go along for the ride or you've given up. What Disch is good at here is giving us what feels like the texture of a fable, a vision of a world broken but survivable . . . what strikes me while reading it is there doesn't seem to be one main event that has made the US such a rickety place, no sudden takeover or imposition, it just feels like one by one people stopped caring and left the people who did care in charge, except the people who did care were either evil or didn't know what they were doing, or both. Life in Iowa doesn't seem to have improved any with the ascent of the "Undergoders" but life in NYC doesn't seem to be much better, everyone scurrying around trying to gather what scarce resources they can in a country where the basic functions don't seem to be functioning properly. Everyone is an island thrusting their hands out for help in the dark and hoping that what greets their grasp isn't topped with a chainsaw. There's a sense that the scenes in the Midwest take place during the day while the New York scenes only occur at night and its how the book makes the world gradually close in on Daniel even as he keeps trying to expand himself to fit that shrinking space and maybe find a crack in the walls that he can escape through.
For me you're not reading this book after a while for what happens, but for how it happens, Daniel's gradual building of a life while trying not to lose sight of what he really wants, his simultaneous embracing and deflecting of the people around him. It’s the backdrop of life done in the midst of the barely functioning machinery of the world that gets me, a tipped sense that never goes completely over into despair but always seems to be asking "What are we doing here?"
That gets driven home in a late scene where someone who has been flying for literally years comes back to this world and finds nothing worth coming back to or sticking around for, as if being away for so long has made them see it with new eyes and finds the very fact of existence somewhat lacking. It's where the book feels tangibly wrenching, where Daniel truly feels truncated in his inability to leave the earth. One of the biggest mysteries of the world is where people go when they, you know, go or if we go anywhere at all. Daniels knows for sure there is a place to go, as wide as everything, and he can't get there. There's an answer inside a song but he can't find the notes in the song, or even the song itself.
To that end I'm not sure how I feel about how it all wraps up. It finishes suddenly, like driving full speed toward a wall and then at the last second the wall revealed to be a painted cloth that gets pulled away to demonstrate that you were headed for a dark pit the whole time, careening quickly into something endless. I can see how it would have made some readers throw up their hands in frustration, not because we're denied a strictly happy ending but because it seems we read all those pages to feel like none of it mattered. I'm not sure its quite that simple and the way I want to read the ending is that the universe gives Daniel what he wants, with a sense of grace that can feel terrifying opaque to us because it only makes sense when you're in a position to see it coming toward you in the very second that it hits. For everyone else it seems absurd and pointless, or a reflexive fallback to a sense of faith, a world "that works in mysterious ways". In Disch's world, everyone goes somewhere and sometimes you can follow and sometimes you can't, sometimes the world stays behind and sometimes it tries to come with you. Perhaps it’s the pit that we're all flung into but I think Disch's gift here is to bring us as close to that edge as he can and make us lean over in the darkness until there's nothing else to be seen, until everything that is and has been is seemingly swallowed, now and eventually. But with an ear into the border of oblivion, he can convince you that the fragment of a note of a song might have come back, an echo from someone gone or the arrival of what could be coming, one day, eventually, the future and tomorrow, or a yesterday displaced. It’s the shiver of implied sound. Its what the book hangs on, in its way. Its what the propulsion of life gets built around.
As probably many people before me have pointed out, Disch is the same person who wrote both "Camp Concentration" and "The Brave Little Toaster" and a quite a few other things besides. I always think of him as a SF writer because that's how encountered him ("Camp Concentration" is good but "334", a series of vignettes about an apartment complex in the future of 2025, is something else entirely and I hope never goes out of print) but the truth is the SF portion of his career by the end was a just small subset of decades of literary/theatre reviews, poetry, fantasy, and horror (I'm pretty sure "The M.D." sold decently well) though he probably never really escaped the label of "The SF guy who sometimes writes other stuff." One of the smartest writers to work in the genre, his style wasn't for everyone but when it worked, boy howdy did it work.
This one didn't hit me like "334" did (very little would, but then I also encountered that book in college so it was probably somewhat formative for me) but it sure hit the critics hard, garnering a wide range of praise and awards almost out of proportion to how obscure its become. I had forgotten he had even written this until I encountered it in my stack but at the time critics fell all over it, with Harold Bloom even listing it in his "Western Canon" and David Pringle including it as one of SF's hundred best novels. It won the John W Campbell Aware and was nominated for basically everything else but these days its out of print and even before Disch's death in 2008 (sadly, he died of suicide, having lost his partner of thirty years in 2005) it had fallen into a bit of obscurity . . . my copy is from 2003 and it doesn't seem like it was in print again for very long.
You could say its just a case of tastes changing or a book just being massively overpraised before coming back down to earth but here it does seem to be one of those instances where critics were readier for this book than audiences were. Something I find interesting is how sneaky it is in its premise . . . we're introduced to Daniel Weinreb, a boy growing up in good ol' Iowa. When we meet him his mother had run off, leaving him and his dentist father to fend for themselves (she eventually comes back, which is when we get the first references to "flying") and its only very gradually that we get the idea that something is odd in the state of Iowa. Daniel is a young child when we first encounter him and so we don't get a sitdown lesson in the recent history of the US, meaning you have to pick up stuff from context. It’s a subtle approach but it also tends to keep things at a slight distance so its hard to really get a handle on how much life has changed. But then, everyone seems miserable which is a familiar feeling the last few years.
So without putting all the changes front and center like "The Handmaid's Tale" and a plethora of near-dystopias you're left with what amounts to a coming of age tale against a backdrop of everything falling apart, a young man surrounded by people who for the most part are just as terribly off as he is . . . no one seems sure how things have gotten here and frankly no one is in a position to do anything about it anyway. So Daniel kind of blunders along with his life like any kid, testing boundaries until one day he gets a little too close to a boundary and it decides to bite back.
The book does a little shift at that point, going from a place where the previous "boy, being in Iowa sort of sucks" is replaced by "Holy crap, being in Iowa really sucks for me personally". Daniel spends some time in prison and again, much as you want to blame Ugly Future Iowa for how bad this section of the book is, prisons right now still have forced labor so its not like Disch is giving us much of a stretch here. But comes into focus here is Daniel's increasing fascination with the concept of flying, something that becomes, if not an obsession, at least a Top Three concern for him going forward all the way through to the end of the book. He learns more about how it works and discovers that it requires to some extent a good singing voice (which he does not have) and beyond that, a real surge of feeling to accompany lifting one's voice, like karaoke taken to off the charts level of passion, only it doesn't necessarily require an audience. Imagine being a legend in your own mind and then somehow doubling that image. Maybe, then, possibly, you two can fly.
Yes, it’s a metaphor (and though the book has LGBTQ themes, its not the secret story of Disch's coming out . . . if nothing else he had been out for ten years by the time this was written) and if the book seems to stumble its in how to exactly handle the whole idea of flying . . . at times it seems to lean toward the whole concept as a representation of everyone's desire to get away from this terrible world and other moments it mostly focuses on Daniel's inability to fly as a symbol of his distance from his fellow human beings. Which means it kind of hovers in the background without really taking center stage and when it starts to inch a bit more into view its unclear what real purpose it serves. Replace "flying" with, I don't know, "wanting to live in Hawaii" and I'm not sure how much different the book would be. Daniel doesn't seem to be the only person who can't fly but he seems to be the only person who cares quite a bit about it to not be able to do it, which leads to some interesting life choices along the way.
What this is that for all intents and purposes the book becomes a sort of a parade of Daniel trying to make the best out of things going wrong all the time. After prison he falls in love withe the daughter of a local rich guy (who doesn't automatically hate him! but rest assured he's not a benevolent rich guy) which goes not terribly until flying enters the picture again and suddenly Daniel is on his own in New York City, mostly broke and under a different name (though not for the reasons you might think). And what do you do when you're down and out in NYC . . . why, go into the theatre, of course. But again, not the way you might think.
By this point in the book you've either agreed to go along for the ride or you've given up. What Disch is good at here is giving us what feels like the texture of a fable, a vision of a world broken but survivable . . . what strikes me while reading it is there doesn't seem to be one main event that has made the US such a rickety place, no sudden takeover or imposition, it just feels like one by one people stopped caring and left the people who did care in charge, except the people who did care were either evil or didn't know what they were doing, or both. Life in Iowa doesn't seem to have improved any with the ascent of the "Undergoders" but life in NYC doesn't seem to be much better, everyone scurrying around trying to gather what scarce resources they can in a country where the basic functions don't seem to be functioning properly. Everyone is an island thrusting their hands out for help in the dark and hoping that what greets their grasp isn't topped with a chainsaw. There's a sense that the scenes in the Midwest take place during the day while the New York scenes only occur at night and its how the book makes the world gradually close in on Daniel even as he keeps trying to expand himself to fit that shrinking space and maybe find a crack in the walls that he can escape through.
For me you're not reading this book after a while for what happens, but for how it happens, Daniel's gradual building of a life while trying not to lose sight of what he really wants, his simultaneous embracing and deflecting of the people around him. It’s the backdrop of life done in the midst of the barely functioning machinery of the world that gets me, a tipped sense that never goes completely over into despair but always seems to be asking "What are we doing here?"
That gets driven home in a late scene where someone who has been flying for literally years comes back to this world and finds nothing worth coming back to or sticking around for, as if being away for so long has made them see it with new eyes and finds the very fact of existence somewhat lacking. It's where the book feels tangibly wrenching, where Daniel truly feels truncated in his inability to leave the earth. One of the biggest mysteries of the world is where people go when they, you know, go or if we go anywhere at all. Daniels knows for sure there is a place to go, as wide as everything, and he can't get there. There's an answer inside a song but he can't find the notes in the song, or even the song itself.
To that end I'm not sure how I feel about how it all wraps up. It finishes suddenly, like driving full speed toward a wall and then at the last second the wall revealed to be a painted cloth that gets pulled away to demonstrate that you were headed for a dark pit the whole time, careening quickly into something endless. I can see how it would have made some readers throw up their hands in frustration, not because we're denied a strictly happy ending but because it seems we read all those pages to feel like none of it mattered. I'm not sure its quite that simple and the way I want to read the ending is that the universe gives Daniel what he wants, with a sense of grace that can feel terrifying opaque to us because it only makes sense when you're in a position to see it coming toward you in the very second that it hits. For everyone else it seems absurd and pointless, or a reflexive fallback to a sense of faith, a world "that works in mysterious ways". In Disch's world, everyone goes somewhere and sometimes you can follow and sometimes you can't, sometimes the world stays behind and sometimes it tries to come with you. Perhaps it’s the pit that we're all flung into but I think Disch's gift here is to bring us as close to that edge as he can and make us lean over in the darkness until there's nothing else to be seen, until everything that is and has been is seemingly swallowed, now and eventually. But with an ear into the border of oblivion, he can convince you that the fragment of a note of a song might have come back, an echo from someone gone or the arrival of what could be coming, one day, eventually, the future and tomorrow, or a yesterday displaced. It’s the shiver of implied sound. Its what the book hangs on, in its way. Its what the propulsion of life gets built around.
December 30, 2013
A truly brilliant novel, despite a disturbing premise. Disturbing, mostly because the guy lived it. All spheres of life have their ridiculous, corrupt and oppressive aspects, but to have a decent life of some sort, you must accommodate to it. Nonetheless, in the long run, it's impossible. Death is the only way out. The guy was a well-known writer within the SF community, pioneering actually, had a long term relationship with a man he loved, and then killed himself several years after his lover died.
The book follows a protagonist from boyhood to death. In each phase of his life, he embodies Dish's worldview. Living in Iowa as a fascist, fundamentalist police state, he finds a job smuggling in a newspaper from Minneapolis. He's sent to prison for it. After years in prison, he's let out when the law changes. He meets a woman who is the scion of a wealthy family. From their, Dish illustrates the impossibility of wealth as an "out." The title reflects "flying"--an escape from the body facilitated by song. The girlfriend/wife escapes; the protagonist doesn't. The hypocrisies of the NY arts scene in which mediocre bel canto talents cavort in blackface is highlighted.
Crossing the borders of absurd and realist, filled with irony and social commentary, one revels in it's beautiful prose. And yet, from the third person limited perspective, one can't see all of Disch. The man was a progressive; in the book, all attempts at overthrow or reform of the system are largely dismissed. Well, you can't do everything in one book.
The ending was a true shocker, but well justified in retrospect.
Prepare to think, prepare to enjoy good writing: read the book.
The book follows a protagonist from boyhood to death. In each phase of his life, he embodies Dish's worldview. Living in Iowa as a fascist, fundamentalist police state, he finds a job smuggling in a newspaper from Minneapolis. He's sent to prison for it. After years in prison, he's let out when the law changes. He meets a woman who is the scion of a wealthy family. From their, Dish illustrates the impossibility of wealth as an "out." The title reflects "flying"--an escape from the body facilitated by song. The girlfriend/wife escapes; the protagonist doesn't. The hypocrisies of the NY arts scene in which mediocre bel canto talents cavort in blackface is highlighted.
Crossing the borders of absurd and realist, filled with irony and social commentary, one revels in it's beautiful prose. And yet, from the third person limited perspective, one can't see all of Disch. The man was a progressive; in the book, all attempts at overthrow or reform of the system are largely dismissed. Well, you can't do everything in one book.
The ending was a true shocker, but well justified in retrospect.
Prepare to think, prepare to enjoy good writing: read the book.
June 28, 2012
I first read this when I was in Junior High (probably too young for some of the subject matter.) I identified with the main character -after all, I was also a paperboy who delivered the Minneapolis Tribune. As my life has developed, more coincidences have developed - for instance, the main character became the kept boy of an African-American castrato opera singer, while I became the piano accompanist of an African-American countertenor singer. I figure I probably should re-read the book and see what other parallels I can find.
January 21, 2014
On Wings of Song left a deep impact on me in many ways. It is, if memory serves me correct, divided into three sections that serve as three unique aesthetic visions of the life of the protagonist. His childhood, his falling in love, and his final isolation. Devastating, a deeply moving and powerful work. I will need to write a more serious review of this work when I have the time.
March 18, 2009
Weird, good. Disch themes in common with Camp Concentration: unjust imprisonment, the police state, drugs, dandies.
Despite some inherent corniness -- like how singing beautifully turns people into a magical flying fairies -- I find myself thinking about this book pretty often.
Despite some inherent corniness -- like how singing beautifully turns people into a magical flying fairies -- I find myself thinking about this book pretty often.
May 29, 2012
I read this book years ago and remember nothing about it except the intensity with which I hated it, especially given the title, which sounded like it would be a beautiful uplifting story! I was mad at Disch for years over this and never read anything else by him.
February 6, 2014
I, like Daniel, have spent my hours with Hanon's Virtuoso Pianist. The connection between making music and flying is totally natural.
The one-star reviews are too funny. Obviously this novel was too much for some people.
The one-star reviews are too funny. Obviously this novel was too much for some people.
February 28, 2010
another of those rare finds in literature that can be read and re-read throughout a lifetime
January 13, 2025
A Charming dark humor dystopian novel, where prisoners are forced to buy McDonalds to live, black face becomes high fashion and the only way out is to sing with all your heart. I loved it
August 24, 2021
My there's there's lot I'm this book. Mostly good, but it also falls short of 5 star quality primarily because it didn't focus as much on the elements I found interesting. But it's definitely worth a read, and it seems to have been unfairly forgotten.
March 25, 2022
Es triste observar que el autor de esta novela acabó exactamente como uno de sus personajes, volándose la tapa de los sesos. Un personaje casi anecdótico, pero aún así no deja de resultar premonitorio. También es injusto que terminara poco menos que en la indigencia, habiendo parido novelas de este calibre, y que por ello decidiera suicidarse. Por desgracia, le tocó vivir mucho de lo que le tocó escribir, y este libro seguramente sea su mejor ejemplo.
Obra multifacética que aúna distopía, autobiografía, crítica social y un elemento metafórico más o menos fantasioso. Seguro que una relectura abriría nuevos horizontes. Pero más allá de eso, queda la poesía, la perfección con la que está escrita, con sus veladas referencias culturales y su profunda sensibilidad. Imprescindible.
Obra multifacética que aúna distopía, autobiografía, crítica social y un elemento metafórico más o menos fantasioso. Seguro que una relectura abriría nuevos horizontes. Pero más allá de eso, queda la poesía, la perfección con la que está escrita, con sus veladas referencias culturales y su profunda sensibilidad. Imprescindible.
September 16, 2016
Storyline: 4/5
Characters: 5/5
Writing Style: 4/5
World: 3/5
--Below information added approximately a year after original reading--
It is after this book that I learned of the subgenre of "New Wave." I like the subtlety, the hinting, and the allusion in the genre and this book here. I like the mystery of trying to determine what is going on in this world, why it is accepted as normal or how it is different. Stylistically I liked a lot that went on here. I don't find any pleasure in homoeroticism, though, and domination games contained here were too weird and perverse for my preferences.
Characters: 5/5
Writing Style: 4/5
World: 3/5
--Below information added approximately a year after original reading--
It is after this book that I learned of the subgenre of "New Wave." I like the subtlety, the hinting, and the allusion in the genre and this book here. I like the mystery of trying to determine what is going on in this world, why it is accepted as normal or how it is different. Stylistically I liked a lot that went on here. I don't find any pleasure in homoeroticism, though, and domination games contained here were too weird and perverse for my preferences.
June 3, 2017
(4,5). Este libro tiene el final más demoledor, desesperanzador y desgarrador que he leído en mi vida. Por favor, si os gusta la ciencia ficción, dadle una oportunidad a Disch, es un autor extraordinario y muy poco conocido e infravalorado. De nuevo, por favor, leed a Disch.
https://sustherlibros.wordpress.com/2...
https://sustherlibros.wordpress.com/2...
August 11, 2008
I don't know if I'd list is one of the 100 Best but it is a uniquely matter of fact dystopia. And the characters are a step above SciFi fare. Beutifully written, but a little heartless. I never got as attached to Daniel as I would have liked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Wings...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Wings...
August 4, 2010
Niesamowita książka. Od dłuższego czasu nie mogłam znaleźć książki, która pochłonęłaby mnie w takim stopniu, że nie mogę przestać o niej myśleć. Disch stworzył arcydzieło, które na długo pozostanie w mojej pamięci. Polecam!
May 17, 2024
A strange book, this. Critically acclaimed yet a commercial failure, Thomas M Disch’s science fiction novel On Wings of Song won the 1980 John W Campbell memorial Award. It was published in 1979.
The first part relates Daniel Weinreb’s childhood in twenty-first century town of Amesville in Iowa, whose strict Christian Right regime of the Undergoders prohibits almost all music. ‘Why were people like that so bent on patrolling people’s most private thoughts?’ (p111).
With a friend he sneaked away and crossed the border to watch a musical movie. ‘This, then, was what it was all about. This, when it issued from within you, was the liberating power that all other powers feared and wished to extirpate: song. It seemed to Daniel that he could feel the music in the most secret recesses of his body, an ethereal surgeon that would rip his soul free from its crippling flesh’ (p31).
Daniel’s world changes when his minor rebellion – in the form of circulating a radical newspaper – condemns him to the local prison at Spirit Lake. He is fourteen. While here, he hears prisoners play music. ‘... there seemed to be this difference between the language of music and the language of words: it didn’t seem possible, in the language of music, to lie’ (p52). The prison is without bars – for each prisoner carries an electrically controlled explosive in his stomach (after a fashion, pre-empting the Rutger Hauer 1991 movie Wedlock).
Daniel, like many people, is aware that with the help of special apparatus providing some kind of feedback, the users can fly when they sing. In essence, the singer’s body stays fixed to the apparatus but the ‘soul’ – or referred to as the ‘fairy’ – floats away, something like remote viewing which was postulated and seemingly adopted by Ingo Swann in the early 1970s. Daniel is captivated by this idea and is determined to learn to sing and then to fly...
Released from prison, he becomes friendly with Boadicea, the daughter of local tycoon Grandison Whiting, usually referred to as Boa. Inevitably, they fall in love. ‘... and felt himself to be, with her, ineffably, part of a single process that began in that faraway furnace that burned atoms into energy... the moment when he had felt needles of light piercing his and Boa’s separate flesh, knitting their bodies like two threads into the intricate skein of that summer’s profusions’ (p152).
National shortages – due to many factors including terrorism – affected the people in New York and elsewhere. Chris Moor's cover illustration depicts the decadent milieu Daniel is embroiled in. There’s a poignant episode where a body builder cannot obtain his proteins either legally or on the black market: as his muscles waste, he deteriorates and ‘he blew out his brains’ (p241).
A great deal of musical knowledge is displayed, notably operas. Eventually, Daniel does learn to sing. Bearing in mind that some aspects of the novel can be construed as a bitter satire, the ending is probably apt, though I didn’t like it.
As may be gleaned from the above quotations, Disch was also a poet. The writing is very good. Sadly, Disch suffered depression after the death of his life-partner Charles Naylor and about three years, in his New York apartment, later he shot himself. He was 68.
The first part relates Daniel Weinreb’s childhood in twenty-first century town of Amesville in Iowa, whose strict Christian Right regime of the Undergoders prohibits almost all music. ‘Why were people like that so bent on patrolling people’s most private thoughts?’ (p111).
With a friend he sneaked away and crossed the border to watch a musical movie. ‘This, then, was what it was all about. This, when it issued from within you, was the liberating power that all other powers feared and wished to extirpate: song. It seemed to Daniel that he could feel the music in the most secret recesses of his body, an ethereal surgeon that would rip his soul free from its crippling flesh’ (p31).
Daniel’s world changes when his minor rebellion – in the form of circulating a radical newspaper – condemns him to the local prison at Spirit Lake. He is fourteen. While here, he hears prisoners play music. ‘... there seemed to be this difference between the language of music and the language of words: it didn’t seem possible, in the language of music, to lie’ (p52). The prison is without bars – for each prisoner carries an electrically controlled explosive in his stomach (after a fashion, pre-empting the Rutger Hauer 1991 movie Wedlock).
Daniel, like many people, is aware that with the help of special apparatus providing some kind of feedback, the users can fly when they sing. In essence, the singer’s body stays fixed to the apparatus but the ‘soul’ – or referred to as the ‘fairy’ – floats away, something like remote viewing which was postulated and seemingly adopted by Ingo Swann in the early 1970s. Daniel is captivated by this idea and is determined to learn to sing and then to fly...
Released from prison, he becomes friendly with Boadicea, the daughter of local tycoon Grandison Whiting, usually referred to as Boa. Inevitably, they fall in love. ‘... and felt himself to be, with her, ineffably, part of a single process that began in that faraway furnace that burned atoms into energy... the moment when he had felt needles of light piercing his and Boa’s separate flesh, knitting their bodies like two threads into the intricate skein of that summer’s profusions’ (p152).
National shortages – due to many factors including terrorism – affected the people in New York and elsewhere. Chris Moor's cover illustration depicts the decadent milieu Daniel is embroiled in. There’s a poignant episode where a body builder cannot obtain his proteins either legally or on the black market: as his muscles waste, he deteriorates and ‘he blew out his brains’ (p241).
A great deal of musical knowledge is displayed, notably operas. Eventually, Daniel does learn to sing. Bearing in mind that some aspects of the novel can be construed as a bitter satire, the ending is probably apt, though I didn’t like it.
As may be gleaned from the above quotations, Disch was also a poet. The writing is very good. Sadly, Disch suffered depression after the death of his life-partner Charles Naylor and about three years, in his New York apartment, later he shot himself. He was 68.
May 11, 2019
This is an almost perfect novel, but it may take a while to learn how to read it. It contains a dizzying assortment of concepts, presented so seamlessly and casually that it's easy to lose them in the exuberant momentum of the prose. Even so, it reveals itself slowly, and the reader is well into the narrative before it becomes clear what kind of story this is.
It is science-fiction in the sense of building a self-contained world, but the absurdist, dreamlike fertility of the world place it closer to fantasy. It is a fractured world, full of woozy anomalies- Daniel's age, for example. In the early portions of the novel, when he is an adolescent, he rarely actually acts like an adolescent. There is a distracting absurdity in the fact that he seamlessly returns to the mundane conflicts of a high school teenager after months spent in a prison which is little more than a concentration camp. But the concepts at work here- youthful disillusionment, moral compromise, wounded idealism- are common and sound, they are just warped and distorted by novel's fluid, shifting texture. One-off characters, sometimes grotesque in the Dickensian sense of possessing a single all-consuming eccentricity, will disappear and turn up hundreds of pages later, utterly changed and in unsuspected circumstances. The tone of the writing itself may lapse into romantic earnestness or ironic satire on the same page. Overall these contradictions serve to create an effectively disorienting, almost surreal, reading experience.
But this is not a pretentious book. The scope is epic and the canvas is flamboyantly cluttered, but the execution is economical and assured. Nothing is unnecessary, nothing is indulgent. The themes are universal and are never obscured by Disch's approach. The world of the novel is a nightmarish exaggeration of the disparity between rural America and urban America- society is in constant of flux between collapse tentative stability. But the book is saved from cynicism by its focus on the earnest, wistful, universal human longing for transcendence- social, sexual, and spiritual. Daniel remains, despite himself, an idealist. There is an overarching preoccupation with authenticity, contrasted with the seductive nihilism of the book's free-thinkers. In this world one is either an unreflective fanatic, or a cynic, believing that there is no objective truth, and that to become something one must only pretend to be that thing. The great question is: Can transcendence be faked? And if it is faked successfully, is it really faked at all? In the final third of the book, when the narrative shifts marvelously into a farcical satirical romp, these extremes meet in Daniel himself, who, despite his romantic yearnings, rarely says what he means, and works his way towards the glorious dream of flight by a series of debasements and compromises.
Truly, this is a novel that does everything a novel should do. It is sprawling and funny and moving and poetically open-ended. It is a novel to have a conversation with, to experience, the way you experience people or dreams.
It is science-fiction in the sense of building a self-contained world, but the absurdist, dreamlike fertility of the world place it closer to fantasy. It is a fractured world, full of woozy anomalies- Daniel's age, for example. In the early portions of the novel, when he is an adolescent, he rarely actually acts like an adolescent. There is a distracting absurdity in the fact that he seamlessly returns to the mundane conflicts of a high school teenager after months spent in a prison which is little more than a concentration camp. But the concepts at work here- youthful disillusionment, moral compromise, wounded idealism- are common and sound, they are just warped and distorted by novel's fluid, shifting texture. One-off characters, sometimes grotesque in the Dickensian sense of possessing a single all-consuming eccentricity, will disappear and turn up hundreds of pages later, utterly changed and in unsuspected circumstances. The tone of the writing itself may lapse into romantic earnestness or ironic satire on the same page. Overall these contradictions serve to create an effectively disorienting, almost surreal, reading experience.
But this is not a pretentious book. The scope is epic and the canvas is flamboyantly cluttered, but the execution is economical and assured. Nothing is unnecessary, nothing is indulgent. The themes are universal and are never obscured by Disch's approach. The world of the novel is a nightmarish exaggeration of the disparity between rural America and urban America- society is in constant of flux between collapse tentative stability. But the book is saved from cynicism by its focus on the earnest, wistful, universal human longing for transcendence- social, sexual, and spiritual. Daniel remains, despite himself, an idealist. There is an overarching preoccupation with authenticity, contrasted with the seductive nihilism of the book's free-thinkers. In this world one is either an unreflective fanatic, or a cynic, believing that there is no objective truth, and that to become something one must only pretend to be that thing. The great question is: Can transcendence be faked? And if it is faked successfully, is it really faked at all? In the final third of the book, when the narrative shifts marvelously into a farcical satirical romp, these extremes meet in Daniel himself, who, despite his romantic yearnings, rarely says what he means, and works his way towards the glorious dream of flight by a series of debasements and compromises.
Truly, this is a novel that does everything a novel should do. It is sprawling and funny and moving and poetically open-ended. It is a novel to have a conversation with, to experience, the way you experience people or dreams.
January 11, 2023
Written in 1978, when it was possible to imagine a future where right wingers would suppress speech and imprison dissidents, instead of what really happened, this work follows Daniel Weinreb's life. A life that constantly teeters on the edge of disaster and greatness, it was set in the late 20th century. In the dystopia imagined by Disch, the East Coast is mired in chaos and economic ruin while flyover country is doing very well. Though it is not stated, this appears to be due to the fact that farming is very lucrative (see my review of Famine 1975). The MidWest is also an embodiment of the Christian Religious Right.
There is one more aspect of this future, flying. It appears that some people, with the assistance of a machine, can astral project themselves in a way. They still have some corporeal form, an insect sized body that in their memory of the experience is a winged creature. Some people return to their bodies and others never do. Singing while hooked up to the machine is a necessary element of success. For reasons that Disch doesn't explain, the Christian Right opposes this. I am sure if he was asked, he would explain that of course they would oppose anything that is fun and empowers an individual. As an actual Christian, I would believe that this phenomenon seems to prove the existence of the supernatural and would tend to support it. Of course, this gives Christians the excuse to strongly restrict all singing.
Daniel Weinreb is one of the best realized characters I have encountered in Science Fiction. A nice guy, but not a hero, he almost has it all. A David Copperfield of SF.
There is one more aspect of this future, flying. It appears that some people, with the assistance of a machine, can astral project themselves in a way. They still have some corporeal form, an insect sized body that in their memory of the experience is a winged creature. Some people return to their bodies and others never do. Singing while hooked up to the machine is a necessary element of success. For reasons that Disch doesn't explain, the Christian Right opposes this. I am sure if he was asked, he would explain that of course they would oppose anything that is fun and empowers an individual. As an actual Christian, I would believe that this phenomenon seems to prove the existence of the supernatural and would tend to support it. Of course, this gives Christians the excuse to strongly restrict all singing.
Daniel Weinreb is one of the best realized characters I have encountered in Science Fiction. A nice guy, but not a hero, he almost has it all. A David Copperfield of SF.
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