Margie and the Atomic Brain

In the way it embellishes the implications of quantum physics in a narrative context, I consider Margie and the Atomic Brain to be literature’s first true multiverse novel, existing as a superposition of ever-bifurcating and contradictory moments lived and relived within a greater web of experience that, I hope, cumulatively suggests the macro-/micro-cosmic nature of our own universe. Featuring a cast of over 200 characters, the mise en abyme structure is sustained by a rich bricolage of subplots, among them the Nevada Test Site-born rivalry between a USAF Lieutenant Colonel and the German Marxist astrophysicist, Dr. Karl Bunsenberger, inventor of the time machine around which the narrative conditions are initiated, Bunsenberger’s midlife struggle to adapt to his wife’s open relationship with his future self come back from the future, a forbidden love affair between WAC cadets on the Boeing assembly line, an organist’s fifty-year struggle to perfect Bach’s Goldberg Variations (a metafictional element emblematic of the novel’s own structure as variations on a theme), and the unforgettably baroque eroticism of a band of libertine filmmakers on their quest to exploit the chaos unleashed by a giant brain monster, dubbed the Petacerebrum, as they shoot a monster movie within a monster movie novel. Though the story makes use of a century’s worth of kitsch, I see the novel as having more in common with Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling or Joseph McElroy’s Plus than with IT or the vintage pulps it mines for tropes and thematic material.