Book Review: Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede

Bradley Denton

1991

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

I’m torn between two reactions to this book. On the one hand, it was funny and, overall, a good read. On the other hand, its boisterous tone sometimes felt slapsticky and forced, and the final climactic confrontation was a bit disappointingly predictable.

I liked the hapless main character, Oliver Vale, and I was moved by his sad backstory, told in flashbacks throughout the novel. Oliver's bad luck started when he was accidentally conceived by his teenage parents on February 3, 1959—the night Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper were all killed in a plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa. Oliver’s father killed himself the next morning when he found out about the crash, and Oliver’s mother began a descent into insanity; she began to believe in aliens and Atlantis and that her son was the reincarnation of Buddy Holly. I sympathized with her, trapped by an unexpected baby at the age of seventeen, even if I didn’t like her very much. Her mental instability reached a sad peak when she, too, killed herself—on February 3, 1984, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the night Buddy was killed.

The book’s narrative starts five years after Oliver’s mother’s death, in 1989. Oliver is in his house in Kansas, watching a John Wayne movie on TV, when the program suddenly switches to a broadcast showing a man who looks very much like Buddy Holly standing on what looks very much like the surface of one of the moons of Jupiter (you can tell it's a moon of Jupiter because Jupiter and its big red spot are hovering in the background). Buddy looks bewildered and is carrying a guitar.

Buddy doesn’t appear to know what else to do, so he starts talking to the air. At one point he says there is a sign hanging on the camera pointed at him that says he should contact an Oliver Vale in Kansas for help.

                                     

It turns out that the Buddy Holly broadcast is preempting programming on all channels all over the entire country. And it goes on and on for hours, with Buddy Holly variously singing songs and talking to the camera and repeating his request for somebody to contact Oliver Vale for help. Eventually Oliver realizes that the disturbance is nationwide, and that everyone will think that he is to blame and will come after him. So he decides to take off for Buddy's grave in Lubbock, Texas, to prove whether or not Buddy is really in fact buried there, or if there is a chance he really is alive. (Oliver hasn’t yet thought about how to prove whether or not Buddy is really on Ganymede, if he turns out not to be in his grave.)

What follows, and takes up most of the rest of the book, is a sometimes funny, sometimes plodding cross-country ride across the plains of Kansas and Oklahoma. It begins on Oliver’s Ariel motorcycle (which may or may not have originally been Buddy Holly’s) and continues on various other modes of transportation as Oliver runs into setbacks. He is chased by a motley collection of pursuers, including his therapist and her boyfriend; a homicidal FCC agent; a hot-headed woman he runs afoul of in a gas station; his irate TV-loving neighbors and their doberman pinscher, Ringo; and numerous followers of preempted and vindictive televangelist Reverend Bill Willard. 

Oliver is also helped out by a few people over the course of his journey, and I liked most of them, especially Boog, a motorcycle salesman; Pete, Oliver’s uncle’s buddy from Vietnam; and Pete’s children. But Ringo was by far my favorite character.

During Oliver’s ride to Lubbock, things get weirder and weirder. For one thing, the FCC determines that the broadcast really is coming from Ganymede. To Oliver, this proves that he is innocent, but to the FCC, it proves that he is something far more dangerous. And after Oliver has Ringo chase him down the highway at 70 miles an hour and chomp off the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle without batting an eye, leaving behind a mechanical tooth (and, later, popping out a robotic eyeball), he realizes that perhaps the dog and its owners aren’t what they seem, and that maybe his mother’s talk about UFOs and aliens might not have been that crazy after all.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Sometimes Denton’s humor came close to a good Vonnegut-like dry wit, but in the end he always veered more toward more obvious jokes than Vonnegut would have done. The rollicking chase that takes up most of the book reminded me of Smokey and the Bandit or It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; fun and breathless but maybe a bit over the top for the tone of this novel. About halfway through I began to have a sinking feeling—which turned out to be well-founded—that, like those movies, all of the various travelers traveling at breakneck speed across middle America would inevitably have to meet up at the end in one big Great Reveal scene which would tie everything up in a neat but anticlimactic bow.