Contemporary Authors

About

Margaret-Wappler-v1

I’m a writer based in Los Angeles. I’ve written about the arts and pop culture for the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Elle, Cosmo, the Believer, Village Voice and several other publications. My debut novel, Neon Green, out now from Unnamed Press, has been praised as “witty and entertaining” by the LA Times, and “a clever and touching family drama” by Chicago Magazine. I’m also a regular panelist on Pop Rocket, a weekly pop culture podcast from Maximum Fun.

I was on staff at the Los Angeles Times for seven years, covering music, books, film and TV. Before that I worked as the books and food editor at Newcity, a Chicago alt weekly. I also ran the books and fiction section of Venus, a magazine dedicated to covering women in music. My fiction and essays have appeared in Black Clock, Public Fiction, Joyland Retro, Yes Is the Answer: And Other Prog Rock Tales, and Here She Comes Now.

In addition to writing, I teach fiction and nonfiction at Writing Workshops Los Angeles. I also critique and edit manuscripts, and lead private writing workshops.

I have an MFA in Critical Studies from the California Institute of the Arts, and a BA from Columbia College Chicago. If so inclined, please follow my Twitter musings @MargaretWappler.

Hypertext Interview with Margaret Wappler By ADMIN | January 11, 2017 0 Comments
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INTERVIEWED BY CHRISTINE RICE

A few chapters into Margaret Wappler’s surreal (and, at the same time, totally realistic) novel, Neon Green, a family wins an extended backyard visit from a spaceship. In light of this, I mentioned to Margaret that, in the mid-1970s, our neighborhood had a twilight encounter with a craft that momentarily hovered over our neighborhood kickball game.

Then, and at the expense of sounding like a total crackpot, I asked, “Have you ever had an encounter with a UFO?”

After a few beats (wherein I imagined Margaret rolling her eyes), she politely replied that, no, she hadn’t. But, she continued, during her research she did read about many UFO sightings in the Midwest, mainly in the 1950s and sixties and some in the 1970s, and that my neighborhood’s collective experience did fit many of the same patterns: a craft not of this world that hovers and makes some unusual movements, very unlike a plane or helicopter.

In the end, all of is neither here nor there. What’s important is that you read Neon Green because it’s completely unique. It isn’t another one of those souless dystopian novels with a wildly illogical plot. It doesn’t keep the audience at arm’s length. It gathers you in, tangles you up. It is, at its core, a novel about family and the way family deals (or doesn’t deal) with crisis, with illness, with loss.

Margaret and I spoke earlier this year, shortly after Neon Green was published.

CHRISTINE RICE: Why did you set Neon Green in 1994?

MARGARET WAPPLER: I wanted a time that I had warm, nostalgic feelings towards, to contrast with the spaceship’s chillier sci-fi tones. The year 1994 also feels like the last of a certain era – the Pre-Internet Age, when you couldn’t Google the answers to every last mystery. I came of age in the ‘90s – I’m not saying it was a better time, or a more innocent time or any of that, but it’s a decade that I personally miss, and which I haven’t seen much of in fiction. I also got a big kick out of taking the authenticity-obsessed mid-‘90s and dropping something otherworldly but still crassly corporate in the middle of it. Here are spaceships controlled by a U.S. corporation who will only let the middle-class get one if they win a sweepstakes. That’s pretty gross, according to the cultural ethos of 1994.

CR: Did you ever doubt your decision to set it in 1994? And if you did, what convinced you otherwise?

MW: This is possibly selective memory at work here, but I don’t remember seriously doubting it. There were too many good reasons to set it at that time, too many thematic tie-ins. For instance, the environmental movement in the mid ‘90s. Everyone thought Clinton and Gore would usher in better legislation; that renewed optimism plays into the plot and the characters in direct and indirect ways. Ernest, the environmentalist patriarch of the family, is feeling more empowered, and well, self-righteous, because of that renewed vigor.

CR: That is interesting…considering the current political climate.

MW: If this book was set in 2017, with Trump as president, Ernest would be completely terrified. Let’s be real though: You don’t have to be a diehard environmentalist to be scared of what Trump and his administration will do, or not do, in terms of climate change. I’m sure they will attempt to loosen or destroy every safeguard currently in place. In that political reality, I can see Ernest rising up for battle. He’d be inspired by the fight. I hope we can all summon that kind of fire for the next four years, if Trump makes it that long.

CR: Do you recall the first moment when you envisioned this story? Was there a hair trigger idea or did it develop more organically?

MW: I usually get story ideas from images. For Neon Green, I saw a classic B movie flying saucer parked in a suburban back yard – not a suburb of McMansion affluence and not King of the Hill working class but something in between. An older, statelier suburb, with well-educated liberals. A family was gathered in the grass looking at the spaceship and they all had different expressions and not one of them was shock. The expressions ranged from irritated (Ernest) to amused (Cynthia) to elated (Gabe) to slightly freaked out but trying to play it cool (Alison). Initially, I wrote to find out why they’d all be on such different pages about it. Pretty quickly, I knew what I wanted the ending to be but I had to figure out how the story would organically arrive there.

CR: Have you always been fascinated by space and UFOs?

MW: Now that I’m thinking about it, some of my most seminal childhood moments involved space of some kind. In fourth grade, my teacher wheeled out the TV for us to watch the Challenger launch and a few minutes later, we were having a very shocking talk about death. The movie Space Camp was the first one I ever saw at a slumber party. On Beta, nonetheless! Thinking about space, for me, is also the straightest line to awe and wonder. Maybe it’s corny, but I get shivers reading about the discoveries of new planets. I don’t read those articles unless I want to get a touch freaked out!

CR: Can you comment on your exploration into how humans react to change, to distress in Neon Green?

MW: Neon Green isn’t so much about aliens; it’s about how humans react to aliens. It’s about how families in distress act, and act out. You can learn a lot about a person by seeing how they handle the unknown, whether the unknown is another person, the future, or something unknown in themselves, emotionally or physically. Of course, the Unknown is also tightly wrapped up with The Other. How do we approach The Other – with distrust, empathy, enthusiasm? Why does one person get panicked while another person gets excited?

CR: The Allen parents–Cynthia and Ernest–have spent their entire lives working to improve the environment. Sometimes, the battle seems hopeless. Is that how you feel about the current state of the earth? That humans have done too much damage to turn things around? Or are you more hopeful than that?

MW: Depends on the day! There is just no way to know if we’ve done too much damage. It might sound strange but the damage isn’t as depressing to me as our denial that we’ve done it. When I wrote Neon Green, I thought a lot about climate change denial, and how that position has been embraced by many on the religious right. It struck me as an odd group to deny something simply because they can’t see it. One of the ideas rattling around in the book is how and why some of us deny the existence of anything we can’t see or touch – whether that means holes in the ozone, or gods in the sky, or aliens that may or may not be hiding in a spaceship.

CR: Like Cynthia and Ernest in their middle age, the spaceship has become tattered, a bit shabby. Can you talk about how the spaceship developed in your imagination?

MW: I always wanted it to be a bit ragtag. I like to call it the Spirit Air of flying saucers (sorry, Spirit, don’t sue me). It felt realistic because these spaceships have logged serious miles. Also, I wanted to tap into that banality that all objects eventually suffer from, no matter how new or futuristic they were in the beginning. I did experiment with how much power the spaceship would wield; I wanted it to have some degree of power but to also be vulnerable in certain ways, much like humans are.

CR: Neon Green is set in a fictional suburb of Chicago called Prairie Park and is as integral to the narrative as the characters. Tell me about how the city of Prairie Park developed on the page? You live in LA but you are from the Midwest, yes? How is Prairie Park similar or different from your hometown?

MW: Prairie Park is pretty close to Oak Park, the suburb just west of downtown Chicago where I grew up in the 80s and 90s. (I moved to LA in 2002.) Oak Park was an appealing template because it’s beautiful and idiosyncratic. It has real character as this tiny liberal utopia. It’s not the cookie-cutter suburbs; it’s old guard due to its close proximity to the city. I wanted a setting where people are sophisticated and worldly but they also value safety and security. In the book, you see how different characters react when they think that safety has been compromised.

CR: The father, Ernest, has trouble living in the moment and compromising his standards. That, along with a host of other irritating habits, puts him at odds with his wife Cynthia and teenagers Alison and Gabe. At the same time, he is bracingly self-aware. Tell me how Ernest’s character developed. Did he surprise you in any way?

MW: I’m not going to lie: In earlier drafts, Ernest was a total pain in the ass. I hear from readers sometimes that they hated him and I always want to say – but he’s grown so much! His self-awareness, his humor and the changes he goes through at the end of the book all surprised me, in the sense that I had to dig into him to find those softer parts. He’s obviously a very flawed and demanding character but I think we’ve all got parts of Ernest inside of us. We all have those personal, political or cultural dogmas that we can’t let go of till they’re forcibly pried from us.

CR: At one point, the spaceship is in distress and has run an extension cord to the Allen’s house. After some discussion Cynthia yanks out the cord.

“What do you think is happening in there?” Cynthia whispered. The ship’s windows were dark, as always.
“What if it’s exactly like our house in there?” Cynthia asked.
“What do you mean? An exact replica?”
“Not exactly. What if there’s nothing futuristic in there beyond the hardware it takes to fly that thing around? What if there’s a couch, a TV, a rug? A tacky painting above the mantelpiece? A junk drawer.”
Ernest laughed. “Is this supposed to comfort me right now?”
Cynthia didn’t seem to hear what he said; she was caught in her vision. “They wanted to escape their ordinary lives to look into ours. Are we their fantasy? Do they want to be us?”

In different ways, each member of the Allen family wants to escape – Ernest wants a cleaner planet, Alison and Gabe long to shed the constraints of teenage-dom and their boring suburban lives, Cynthia is trapped in a body that is betraying her. Everyone is in distress. As these conflicts progress, the second half of the novel becomes decidedly darker than the first half.

Did you know where the novel was going when you first started it? In other words, as a reader, I felt surprised by the events. Were you surprised by the events that started to unfold or do you wield more control over the plot?

MW: I had a concrete sense of the feeling of the end, as well as a foggy sense of the actual events, but it was still hard to figure out the best way to get there. One of my favorite quotes about endings is one from Joyce Carol Oates; she says an ending should feel “surprising but inevitable.” I had to find the right balance between those two notions. It had to feel earned, and organically developed. I’m not sure that surprise or control had much to do with it. I thought more about listening and tuning in, like the way a musician might play a note and immediately hear if it resonates with the rest, or if it sounds dissonant. I definitely played some wrong notes in earlier drafts (and I’m sure a few survived).

CR: Neon Green investigates ‘invasions’ of all kinds. At one point, Cynthia recalls the moment she realized she was pregnant with Gabe:

It was the Big Bang in the body. Combustion. Light. White-blue light but not cold. A series of cellular replications, exploding again and again. She loved to close her eyes and look at this image, this density made from her but still totally separate. Eventually as the fetus grew inside of her, the light poured into the physical creature, which changed what she saw when she closed her eyes–she imagined the curl of his fist, his fresh tiny lungs– but she never lost track of the way it felt in the beginning. Like a secret between her and Gabe.
For the moment, she was stable enough to drag herself to the bathroom window. Looking through the dusty glass, she caught the alien ship with one neon green light pointed downwards, blanching a spot of grass.

She waited for the nausea to build up again, and wondered what kind of light was in her now. Was cancer a light or was it an absence of light? Maybe it was a black light, picking up little white flecks in her system and highlighting them as ultraviolet. Was it a searchlight, sweeping back and forth over her insides, looking for more vulnerable tissue? Did it permeate the cancer cells themselves so so that they radiated a bitter white, like burning magnesium that she remembered from college chemistry class? Or was the color more like the neon green of the spaceship, shining out on the light of the grass. The two greens were nearly indistinguishable. One natural; one alien, but nearly the same. The cancer cells were almost like her other cells, with one catastrophic shift in code.

The moments describing Cynthia’s illness and pain are so poignantly and beautifully written. Can you talk about how you developed those moments on the page? In other words, did you research the effects of cancer and the treatment of cancer? Or did you have a more personal experience?

MW: Thank you, Chris! I researched breast cancer – chemotherapy treatments in particular – but it’s also, sadly, from personal experience. My father died from a rare brain tumor when I was 15, after five years of surgeries, chemo and radiation. The way Cynthia’s cancer plays out is very different from my father’s but the essence of the experience is still there. The scene excerpted above juxtaposes early pregnancy with cancer because both of those experiences have been scientifically tracked and yet they’re still mysterious. They’re examples of the body taking over and doing something creative, literally, in one case, and then destructive in the other. The book plays around with how close death and life can be; how our bodies hold the codes for both. All those tiny mysteries that your body, spirit, the person next to you act out every day are part of what keeps Neon Green revolving.

Suburban alienation meets aliens in Margaret Wappler's 'Neon Green'
Margaret Wappler
Margaret Wappler, author of "Neon Green" out from Unnamed Press. (David P. Earle)
Mark Athitakis
Novels can be analyzed in all sorts of ways, but a few iron laws of interpretation apply. One: Every novel set in the suburbs must be a commentary on suburbia. No writer can imagine a leafy bedroom community without riffing on conformity, hypocrisy and upper-middle-class entitlement. Two: Every novel that features the arrival of space aliens on Earth must be a commentary about our fear of the other. Those whirling flying discs aren’t just for gaping at — they’re symbols of our dread of what’s just over horizon.

Margaret Wappler’s debut novel, “Neon Green,” is a witty merger of those conceits: Its plot turns on a spaceship that has parked itself in one family’s backyard in Prairie Park, a town just outside Chicago. Her twist is that the spaceship arrives not with lasers blasting and bloblike creatures demanding fealty, but with a yawning silence. A former Times staff writer, Wappler knows nothing unsettles an anxious suburbanite quite like a stranger who won’t explain why he’s hanging around the neighborhood.

In theory, the Allen clan at the center of the story has nothing to worry about. In this fictional universe, the government has known about intelligent life on Jupiter for a decade and found it so benign that a private company is subcontracted to have saucers hang out in selected backyards for a few months. (“Do not attempt to agitate the aliens,” the legalese cautions. “For entertainment purposes only.”) Ernest, the Allen patriarch and environmental do-gooder, suspects a scheme from an untrustworthy corporate-government alliance. “There’s no real interaction with the aliens,” he says. “It’s just another mindless distraction so we don’t have to think about the real problems on Earth.”

But his teenage kids, Gabe and Alison, who applied for the spaceship on the sly, are enchanted by a visitor that’s disinterested in any “E.T.”-style cutesiness; it’s 1994, after all, and the kids have absorbed the grunge era’s contempt for hollow posturing and admiration for stoic distance. All the ship does is occasionally light up and deposit some green sludge in the backyard. What more proof do you need that Jupiter is keeping it real?

"Neon Green" by Margaret Wappler, from Unnamed Press.
"Neon Green" by Margaret Wappler, from Unnamed Press. (Unnamed Press)
Of course, things soon get complicated anyway. Ernest’s wife, Cynthia, has a troubling dizzy spell and, soon after, a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. The spaceship displays occasional fits of pique that break the household windows and it begins to siphon off electricity from the Allen home, as if to match Cynthia’s depleted energy. In a matter of months, Ernest’s NIMBYism encompasses the entire Milky Way: He’s determined to peg his wife’s illness on the alien guest, gathering soil samples for testing and demanding the family keep a log of the ship’s every gurgle and flicker. Ernest wants family unity, but his paranoia sows only divisiveness. “Take me somewhere, away from here,” Gabe tells the spaceship in a private moment. “Some place cool and maybe just a little bit scary.”

In Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel “The Puppet Masters,” slimy parasitic space monsters arrived in the Iowa cornfields to deploy their mind-control wiles on the heartland rubes. Wappler isn’t so quick to peg flyover country as ignorant, though. Indeed, she’s alert to the fact that one of suburbia’s chief flaws is hyper alertness: Ernest is neurotically obsessive about every toxin his family consumes and his colleagues on the local Earth Day festival committee are fussbudgets about every particular. That need to have everything in apple-pie order doesn’t reconcile with a spaceship that acts like a toddler when it chooses to act at all, “squealing, puking, dumping, and stealing.”

A closer cousin to “Neon Green” is Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise,” partly because of its mysterious-invader-in-the-burbs plot, but also because of its downbeat brand of satire. Wappler plainly enjoys exploring the comic possibilities of, as she puts it, “one of the psychic detritus clusters of the universe, otherwise known as the suburb,” inventing the bureaucratese of the alien-management firm and the family’s observation log, “The Activities of the Unwelcome Visitors From Jupiter.”

But as Cynthia’s health worsens, the overall mood dims and Wappler writes in a dry, plainspoken tenor. “The green light slowly dwindled down in strength until there was barely color, just a faint golden smear and then darkness. The ship lightly rattled and gave off one anemic pop.”

At times these tonal shifts can be queasy-making, and some of the plot mechanics in “Neon Green” aren’t entirely persuasive. You want to see the Allen kids’ emotions to expand beyond adolescent sass, given the weirdness of the aliens’ arrival and the pathos of mom’s illness. And though Ernest’s frustration with the new arrivals is plain, Cynthia’s claims surprisingly little of the stage considering her crisis, and their middle-aged acting-out feels imported from a more familiar domestic novel.

But Wappler has found an entertaining way to make a point that’s often neglected in suburban and alien-invader novels: Being an outsider is a matter of perspective. It’s surely no accident that Wappler gave Ernest’s family the name “Allen,” just one letter off from “alien.” Even sick and skeptical, Cynthia knows that all of us aren’t as different as we might seem, and that we all want to be welcomed. “What if there’s nothing futuristic there beyond the hardware it takes to fly that thing around?” she asks. “They wanted to escape their ordinary lives to look into ours. Are we their fantasy? Do they want to be us?”

NEON GREEN BY MARGARET WAPPLER
REVIEWED BY REBECCA JOHNS
July 17th, 2016

In almost any universe, the arrival of a spaceship from Jupiter in a suburban Chicago backyard would be an earth-shattering occasion. In the historically alternative 1994 of Margaret Wappler’s Neon Green, though, the Allen family views the arrival of a flying saucer in their backyard as little more than a nuisance, a guest overstaying a welcome that was already tenuous at best. Eventually the spaceship becomes a set piece in the family’s internal dramas and a witness, in a way, to an encounter of the entirely ordinary kind.

Kurt Cobain has just died, the internet is still in its infancy, and spaceships from Jupiter, first invited by Ronald Reagan and later overseen by a corporation known as New World Enterprises, have been frequent if still somewhat mysterious visitors to Earth for the past ten years. In the tony Chicago suburb of Prairie Park, Illinois, the aptly named Ernest Allen—environmental crusader and director of the local Earth Day planning committee—can’t even enjoy his fortieth birthday barbecue with his family without pointing out the ways in which the other inhabitants of the park are failing to live up to his exacting environmental standards. When his son spills lighter fluid, Ernest leaves his family to run home for soap to clean it up, refusing to let the chemical soak into the concrete. Pragmatic wife Cynthia, watching all this with bewilderment, believes that Ernest possesses “a kind of environmental Tourette’s, where he was compelled to remark if something didn’t adhere to his principles.”

The family feels justifiably frustrated with Ernest’s myopic view of the world and the limitations it puts on their lives, and after their teenaged son wins the family a visit from Jupiter through a sweepstakes, the cracks between them begin to widen. Gabe, a ham radio enthusiast, spends his nights listening to a program called The Book of Connections, on which an anonymous woman holds forth on topics from sunsets to whether the human eye can really see the color red. Artistically inclined Alison designs custom-drawn sneakers featuring flying saucers for her friends at school. And Cynthia, a lawyer, has to constantly remind her distracted husband to “be here with your family, Ernest….Be here with us,” an admonition that mostly falls on deaf ears. Ernest can’t forget his ideals for long, even as his family begs for them to lavish as much attention on them as he does the environment.

When the spaceship arrives, the air in the house starts to turn poisonous. With its display of flashing lights and loud noises that seem to have no discernible pattern or purpose, the spaceship is one more irritant in the air at first. But it’s not until the spaceship starts dumping day-glo green sludge over the back yard and the Allens themselves—sludge that New World has promised the public is safe and non-toxic—that Ernest’s suspicions really shift into high gear. He demands his family keep a log of the spaceship’s activities, which they do, if only halfheartedly, penning passive-aggressive notes to one another in the guise of watching the ship.

When later Cynthia gets a diagnosis of breast cancer, Ernest is convinced of the rightness of his suspicions about the safety of the ship’s activities. He spends time and money the family doesn’t have testing the green sludge and sharing his findings with a local environmental reporter named Marilyn Fournier whose interest in his crackpot theories may be more personal than professional.

All of this effort comes at the cost of the attention his family, especially Cynthia, needs as she works to ward off the attack of her own personal cellular-level invaders:

“Let’s make a deal,” Ernest said. “You attack the cancer and I’ll attack the spaceship. Then we’ll all live happily ever after.”

She withdrew her hand and adjusted the new hat. The lavender knit rolled up near her ear lobes, outfitted with copper studs.

“I’m uncomfortable with ‘attacking cancer’ because in the end it’s only my own body. It’s not something else… The spaceship—did you have to bring it up? It’s enemy number one now?”

“The spaceship isn’t human, Cynthia. It’s an intruder. It’s from outer space. An alien. We’re supposed to attack stuff like it,” Ernest said, a little wildly. “It’s unnatural for us to just sit around and be friends with it.”

Although it’s painful to watch Ernest hold his family, his friends, his entire neighborhood hostage to ideas that seem more emotional than rational, Neon Green is ultimately his story, and the narrative is strongest in following his descent into suspicion and hostility as his wife grows sicker and his theories about toxic substances take his investigation in an unexpected direction. But Cynthia’s story, too, occasionally offers moments of genuine loveliness, such as in this passage following a particularly nasty round of chemo:

The cancer was now a distinct presence dominating her body, a governing system she involuntarily sheltered. She told herself she was used to this—her body had harbored other beings before. Pregnant with Gabe, she’d known he was there in her body before the blood tests confirmed it. While studying for a law exam, a wave of nausea bowled into her and she clutched at her stomach. A picture emerged in her mind: a suburban street at night, with starless sky above. She strolled past house after house, all of them dark, vacated, but at the end of what turned out to be a cul-de-sac was one bungalow with a light on in an upstairs bedroom, one glowing light in the entire house….Soon the street and the house disappeared and it was just the light. The shine from a primordial being, forged in the core of herself. It was the Big Bang in the body. Combustion. Light.

Where the story falters is when it veers away from Ernest, reaching for an omniscience that doesn’t quite work, first with the alien spacecraft, then with Gabe and Alison, who like the alien presence half-seen behind the glass of the flying saucer never quite come into solid focus.

But it’s the twin metaphors of environmental obsession and cancer-as-invader that act as the centerpiece here, and they’re about as subtle as the day-glo green cover of the book, on which an abstract of a typical flying saucer hovers over an abstract of a typical American neighborhood. The image recalls science-fiction invasions of the past, everything from War of the Worlds to Alien, in which the arrival of the extraterrestrial signals a fight to the death with forces outside our control. In Neon Green the invasion exists first in Ernest’s psyche, then in Cynthia’s traitorous cells. As Cynthia’s illness progresses and the ship begins exhibiting signs of distress, all without a sense of its purpose, one begins to realize the story could easily take place without the presence of a spaceship at all. The Allens’ story is ultimately about a close encounter, though the aliens are ones we’ve known all along.

Neon Green

Margaret Wappler. Unnamed, $16 ISBN 978-1-939419-71-2

Neon Green
BUY THIS BOOK
Prairie Park, Ill., in 1994 is a cultivated suburb of Chicago. It’s middle-class, clean, and homogeneous, a place where Ernest and Cynthia Allen and their kids, Gabe and Alison, can live nice, normal, environmentally conscious lives. They have friendly neighbors, clean streets, and Aurora Park, a beautiful slice of outdoors. In Wappler’s quirky alternate history debut, this normalcy makes a space ship landing in the Allens’ backyard all the more foreign. Gabe entered a contest for a visit from Jupiter, but not all of the Allens feel like lucky winners. Gabe thinks it’s a hoot, but for Ernest, a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist, the ship is anathema. When it starts spewing neon green concoctions onto his lawn, Ernest begins a one-man war of wills to have it removed. Wappler’s examination of the world through this one family is well written but ultimately melancholic with no resolution. Agent: Erin Hosier, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (July)

NEON GREEN BY MARGARET WAPPLER
BY: SARA POLSKY
ISSUE: 5 DECEMBER 2016
wappler

The arrival of a spaceship in suburban Chicago one day in the summer of 1994 kicks off Margaret Wappler’s debut novel Neon Green. The saucer arrives in the back yard of the Allen family home because Ernest and Cynthia Allen’s son, Gabe, has, against his parents’ wishes, entered a sweepstakes for a spaceship visit from Jupiter. The spaceship’s arrival fascinates the neighborhood, but the ship is, once everyone gets a closer look, mostly ordinary: “In some ways, it appeared to be little more than old airplane parts repurposed into a saucer, the same sharkskin metal bolted together” (p. 25). And once it settles, it sits mostly inert in the Allens’ yard. Apart from some noises and flashing lights, it is a prop in what is otherwise a family drama. This is a book about what happens on Earth.

That is true in the most literal sense: the Allens—Ernest, Cynthia, Gabe, and Alison—are ardent environmentalists. The suburb of Chicago where they live, Prairie Park, is a “slice of dream community…a thoughtful and efficient almost-utopia” (p. 2). And Ernest—who when the book opens is standing in the park on his fortieth birthday, trying to grill lunch for his family while avoiding the potential environmental dangers of lighter fluid—wants to keep it that way. To him, “the planet, a temperate rock cradled in a gaseous film as moth-eaten as a vintage veil, was the most precarious and central of all causes” (p. 2). Ernest is the director of Prairie Park’s 1995 Earth Day celebration, and at the point when Neon Green begins, his greatest worries are environmental: what products can he and his family use without harming the planet? How can he balance his commitment to his principles with his need to earn a living? And is it safe to have a spaceship in residence in his yard, dumping sludge on the lawn?

Ernest is determined to catch the spaceship out in some doing, so he sets the family to documenting the ship’s activity in a daily log titled “The Activities of the Unwelcome Visitors From Jupiter.” When Cynthia discovers three lumps in her breast, the stakes of the logging abruptly become higher. Ernest is determined to prove the ship responsible for Cynthia’s cancer—her body’s unwelcome visitor—while Cynthia, Gabe, and Alison are more concerned with the day-to-day issues of Cynthia’s illness and treatment. The spaceship bears witness to all of this, its occupants never emerging.

That plot summary does no justice to how funny Neon Green is alongside its darker moments. Sometimes the humor comes from the book’s premise, the weirdness of everything we think we know about our world bumping up against the idea of our 1994 with aliens from Jupiter visiting it. Looking at a pamphlet for the spaceship visits, Cynthia spots the Wilmington, Delaware, return address. “Of course it’s Delaware-based,” she tells Ernest. “Even flying saucers want a good tax deal” (p. 27). And in a world where Earth’s residents are aware of the existence of aliens from Jupiter who have the technology for interplanetary travel, it’s equally unsurprising that some enterprising person has turned alien tourism into a business with a sweepstakes and an unhelpful customer service hotline.

Some of the humor is internal, baked into the characters’ perspectives. As Ernest researches why the spaceship has begun emitting various smells and learns that the smells are “’their way’ of experimenting with scents they had caught on the wind at some point in their travels,” Ernest muses that “maybe the ship wasn’t so exotic; maybe it was more like an intergalactic Greyhound bus, touring the various dingy stations of Earth” (p. 70).

Though the members of the Allen family have their disagreements, they also tease each other with a fond familiarity that often had me grinning as I read. (“This is what we live with,” Gabe sighs with some affection in the opening scene at the park, as a couple of strangers watch Ernest trying to light the grill without lighter fluid.) The siblings, Gabe and Alison, have a wonderful dynamic, too—it’s clear from their interactions that they are united in understanding the particular weirdnesses of their parents. And through the spaceship log, the Allens have conversations that reveal the characters in ways the ordinary events of the book wouldn’t. As the Allens discuss the smells from the ship, Ernest writes:

Came home to start dinner and the ship was blowing out white air that smelled like hot dough. Took me a while to pinpoint the ship—thought Tom or Olivia might be baking bread. The smells ruined my appetite. Started to make marinated pork chops—next thing I know I’ve eaten nearly a whole bag of chips and a bowl of guacamole. The least it could do, if it’s going to make me so hungry, is produce a loaf of bread. Not that I’d eat it. (p. 69)
The spaceship becomes a sort of character in the family, with the Allens puzzling over any minute change in its behavior. On Christmas Eve morning, Ernest and Cynthia come downstairs to find that the spaceship has plugged itself into their house, “that a long orange extension cord had, as if by magic, snaked out from its place in a box in the garage, slipped in between two folds of metal, and disappeared into the ship’s guts” (p. 179). They debate whether it’s wise to unplug the ship the same way they discuss what’s going on with their kids.

For all that it occupies the Allens’ time and conversation, the spaceship is a fairly neutral actor in the story (and it’s also, as far as I could tell, the only essential difference between Wappler’s invented 1994 and the one many of her readers will have lived through). The rest of the Allens’ lives—fundraising for the Earth Day event, going to school or work, or caring for Cynthia—proceed as they would if the spaceship weren’t present. In fact, one of the things I appreciated most about the book is that the chains of cause and effect felt realistic rather than contrived. Ernest doesn’t set out to prove the spaceship evil and then heroically do so. The spaceship hasn’t landed in the Allens’ yard and suddenly given Cynthia cancer; in fact, the spaceship ends up being as affected by what goes on in the Allens’ world as they are.

So why have a spaceship at all? Ernest, Cynthia, Gabe, and Alison would be the people they are—and they truly did feel like people to me—with the spaceship or without, but I also can’t imagine Neon Green as a straightforward family cancer story minus the aliens. The spaceship adds a weirdness to the story, and heightens the characters’ personality quirks and reactions to events, in a way that feels absolutely essential to the novel. And while alien invasion is a common metaphor for illness, it never feels heavy-handed in this book. Early in the story, standing at her kitchen sink watching the spaceship land in the yard with a tentacle through one of Ernest’s tomato plants, Cynthia thinks, “Some strange knowledge swept in, tidal and moonlit: the spaceship… was meant to be here, but she couldn’t tell if it was bringing release or terror” (p. 21). Take an ordinary life and add cancer to it; take an ordinary year and add aliens to it; take a planet and add pollutants to it: each is an equally unexpected arrival, the kind of shift in a story from which it’s impossible to turn back.

Neon Green, By Margaret Wappler

October 5, 2016 Book Reviews, Read
Many readers read Charles Dickens’s novels and initially conclude he was a satirist, then later realize that the journalist-turned-novelist was reporting what he was seeing. Margaret Wappler’s novel Neon Green opens at a family picnic in suburban Chicago in 1994. Ernest, the earnest environmentalist father, warns a stranger that using lighter fluid on charcoal leads to the consumption of the fluid’s toxins—meanwhile, Ernest’s own pristine charcoal refuses to ignite. We’re obviously reading a satire, except as we get to know the world of the novel, Ernest seems more and more reasonable.

Also, there’s a spaceship. In 1969, the U.S. had made contact with life on Jupiter, and twenty-five years later, Ernest’s son Gabe secretly enters a sweepstakes that earns the family a Jupiterian flying saucer parked in their backyard.

But this isn’t science fiction, except in the most technical sense of the term. It’s not even magic realism. Neon Green is a suburban novel about the environment and disease that features a spaceship, an enigma that the family—under Ernest’s orders—attempts to figure out with the help of a logbook of the ship’s actions.

It’s a first novel, and has those first-novel passages that the reader must push against to finish to return to an otherwise compelling story. A suburban novel about the environment, disease, and a spaceship: it’s heartening that we still have presses, however small, that publish books that, at first glance, are going to deflect a lot of readers. I can’t imagine I would have sought it out had I not read Wappler’s essay on King Crimson in Yes Is the Answer, a collection of prog-rock writing (also published by a small press). –Jim Woster (Unnamed Press, unnamedpress.com)

Bookshots: 'Neon Green' by Margaret Wappler
REVIEW BY FREDDIE MOORE JULY 12, 2016
IN: BOOKSHOTS MARGARET WAPPLER REVIEW SCIENCE FICTION

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Bookshots: 'Neon Green' by Margaret Wappler
Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review
Title:
Neon Green

Who wrote it?
Margaret Wappler, a Los Angeles writer and journalist who co-hosts the podcast, Pop Rocket. Neon Green is her novel debut.

'Neon Green' is a playful and cynical genre-bender.
Plot in a Box:
Imagine suburban Chicago in the 90s, except in this time warp, encounters with UFOs are normal. You can even enter a contest to win a nine-month visit from a flying saucer, which Gabe Allen does without his parents’ permission. When Gabe wins, a whole mess of trouble follows.

Invent a new title for this book:
The Flying Saucer Sweepstakes

Read this if you like(d):
The X-Files and all things 90s nostalgia.

Meet the book’s lead(s):
Gabe’s dad, Ernest Allen, a deadbeat environmentalist and questionable family man. His obsessive tendencies are more destructive than the flying saucer.

Said lead(s) would be portrayed in a movie by:
Steve Carell

Setting: would you want to live there?
Prairie Park, a lovely Chicago suburb occupied by aliens and contaminated with carcinogens? Maybe not.

What was your favorite sentence?
She wanted to hate him, so she tried on the hate.

The Verdict:
When I picked up this book, I assumed there would be aliens. What I found instead was something unexpected: a family drama.

The key character of Neon Green is not the flying saucer, though it occasionally entertains by spewing green sludge or omitting the smell of pancakes or Indian curries. (The Allen Family Log tracks these quirks with hilarious precision.) Instead, Ernest Allen propels the novel forward with his paranoia, narcissism, and disregard for others. He is a difficult character to follow, almost impossible to understand.

One thing readers will sympathize with is this: when terrible things happen it’s comforting to have something to blame. Neon Green is a playful and cynical genre-bender. If you are looking for a book about alien invasions or cohabitation attempts, this isn't it. In Wappler’s debut you’ll find a story about family, illness, infidelity, and the shell of regret that stays when things go unresolved.

‘Neon Green’ Mixes Sci-Fi, Family Drama, and 90s Nostalgia
Posted on July 20, 2016 by Amy Giacalone
37At first, Margaret Wappler’s Neon Green seems like a typical family drama. Ernest, Cynthia, and their two teenage children—Gabe and Alison—live in a Chicago suburb near a park in the mid-90s. They grill together, celebrate birthdays, and get on each other’s nerves. Except in this world, the US government has made contact with aliens on the planet Jupiter.
That and there’s a sweepstakes, where ordinary citizens can enter to win a visit from an alien spaceship, complete with lights, sounds, and neon sludge in their own backyards. Gabe enters to win against his father’s wishes, and voila! A space ship lands at their house days later.
Wappler’s 90s references are as precise and pervasive as the period details from a Hilary Mantel novel. And while the cover and central conceit scream “science fiction,” Neon Green has more in common with We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler or The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. The thrust of the book is the family drama, not the strange and impossible things happening around them.
Family patriarch Ernest is a hardcore environmentalist, and his wife Cynthia is an environmental lawyer. Together, they guilt their children into using only natural soaps, chemicals and foods. Thus the spaceship represents a big challenge for them, and brings out a divide in their family: the parents may have die-hard convictions, but the kids aren’t totally sold on them yet.
When Ernest’s suspicions about the spaceship begin to boil over, he insists that his family keep a daily log, recording all of the ships beeps, pops, and flashing lights. In a pre-smartphone, pre-internet era, this journal is an interesting riff on social media that also accentuate the differences between the characters.
The family drama turns heartbreaking when Cynthia is diagnosed with cancer. Each character deals with her illness differently. As the family unravels, the spaceship begins to take on a new significance as the projection of all their hopes and fears. In one scene, Gabe addresses the spaceship directly.
“Take me somewhere,” he said, “away from here, some place cool and maybe just a little bit fucking scary.” He tried to keep the thought there: simple and pure. But then other questions kept dodging in. What am I supposed to do for a career? Am I supposed to make a lot of money? Or be really powerful? Will I get married and have kids? Never mind all that. He went back to his initial idea. “I want to see the world. Period.”
While Gabe sees the spaceship as an opportunity for escape, his father sees it as an abomination. Thus Wappler uses the spaceship to demonstrate how each family member deals with their frustration and anger. It pulls them apart and brings them together. At times, it’s like Wappler is asking: wouldn’t it be nice to have something physical, sitting in your backyard, that you could blame all your problems on?
Cynthia’s illness takes center stage in the second half of the book, and you begin to forget that spaceships aren’t something that actually existed in the 1990s. And although the premise may seem lighthearted and fun at the onset, Wappler doesn’t pull any emotional punches. In the end, it’s a thoughtful, unusual, and challenging family drama.
FICTION – SCIENCE FICTION, FAMILY
Neon Green by Margaret Wappler
Unnamed Press
Published July 12, 2016
ISBN 9781939419712

‘Neon Green’ Is The Perfect Sci-Fi Weekend Read
Just the right combo of ’90s nostalgia and, of course, aliens

BY KERYCE CHELSI HENRY JULY 09, 2016

PHOTO COURTESY OF UNNAMED PRESS

If we could, we would spend the majority of our time here on earth skimming through our favorite bookshops and running through libraries. But even if we could, there sadly wouldn’t be enough time to read every book in existence—that’s why we rely on recommendations from friends, family, and our favorite authors. Every week, we’ll be sharing some of our favorite reads because literature is, well, lit.

In writer Margaret Wappler’s version of suburban Chicago in 1994, things are pretty much the same as most ’90s nostalgics remember, save for one little detail: aliens. Not only have extraterrestrials made their presence known in the States, but the government has approved visits from Jupiter, allowing those who can afford it to have aliens stop by their weddings and bar mitzvahs, and other people to enter sweepstakes for the chance to have a flying saucer park right outside of their homes.

Most people are thrilled by the program, but environmental activist Ernest Allen couldn’t be more perturbed by it (which comes as no surprise, considering his anal annoyance at pretty much anything that can’t be sourced directly from the Earth). So when his son, Gabe, sneakily signs up for an alien visit and, of course, wins, Ernest mandates that his family—completed by wife Cynthia and daughter Alison—log every spurt, beam of light, and potentially toxic neon green emission from the UFO stationed in their backyard. Just when it seems as if it’s harmless, Cynthia is diagnosed with cancer, and Ernest sets out to prove that the mysterious visitors are to blame. In the process, he and the rest of his family learn that, regardless of how much they may try to micromanage, or blame the unfamiliar, some things simply cannot be controlled.

As if the genius of Neon Green’s plot isn’t enough, Wappler’s penchant for detail is sure to hook readers, illustrating the Allens and their home so vividly that they could easily feel like one of the family’s next-door neighbors during the ordeal—not just because the picture of the flying saucer is so clear, but also because of the emotional connections that are fostered between the reader and each family member. You’ll sympathize equally with Gabe and Alison, who are so eager for an escape from their mundane suburban life; Cynthia, the slowly deteriorating glue that holds the family together; and even Ernest, who becomes so engrossed in establishing the immobile flying saucer as an enemy to distract him from his wife’s health. Moreover, it’s no easy feat to make a pre-internet setting feel relatable in our internet-dependent times, but Wappler transports us to the mid-’90s with ease, making us realize that, with or without government-sanctioned visits from outer space, things haven’t changed that much after all.

UFO-TINGED NOVEL ‘NEON GREEN’ IS MORE THAN JUST A ‘90S POP-CULTURE ROMPImage
Heather Scott PartingtonWed, Jul 13, 2016 (2 p.m.)
Three stars

Neon Green By Margaret Wappler, $16.

It’s 1994 in the suburbs. Girls are wearing scrunchies and Sharpie-customized Converse. Forrest Gump is in movie theaters. Fugazi is on the radio. A flying saucer has just landed in the Allens’ backyard. Margaret Wappler’s novel, Neon Green, details a slightly alternate 1990s where the Allens’ son, Gabe, wins a lottery for a flying saucer. Wappler writes about what binds the family together, and what happens when an invader threatens to drive them apart.

Wappler’s novel operates on the steady mystery of the UFO, but what makes it work is its combination of tropes from the ’90s with believable, complex characters. Neon Green is not just a pop-culture romp, but rather, a careful study of family dynamics. The Allens’ patriarch, Ernest, is a die-hard environmentalist, stripped of his youthful energy and saddled with dad jeans. But he still has some fight left: “The very idea filled him with energy. His life was a fight. He was a fighter, no apologies and no breaks for inconvenience. […] His fight was no less important when it was symbolic. Symbols added up to something.”

Ernest is mostly worried about the sludge the spaceship dumps on the lawn, but his wife, Cynthia, feels a more existential dread. “The spaceship, she thought, was meant to be here but she couldn’t tell if it was bringing release or terror.” As Ernest and Cynthia both try to figure out for themselves what they want the spaceship to mean, their interaction with their teenagers in a family log Ernest makes them keep reveals the most about how everyone is at cross-purposes. Wappler captures the spirit of the 1990s while also capturing the different pacing of conversation before computers and smartphones.

In addition to exploring the mystery of the UFO’s presence, Neon Green illuminates what it means to be a teenager in the ’90s as they unfold. The decade hasn’t yet defined itself. “What was the big passion of this decade? The media had trumped up the ’90s as some sort of second coming of the ’60s, but so far, Kurt Cobain had died too young and that was it for profound generational experiences. […] There had to be more to define his adulthood than his career, or spouse, or what car he drove.”

Neon Green is firmly optimistic, yet laments what humans have done to the environment. Just like the ’90s, it’s a study in contradiction.

Wappler’s work as a reporter informs her style, which is easy and rooted in memorable character descriptions. There are times when Neon Green suffers from its slower pacing, but it is an imaginative what-if. Wappler’s visitors from Jupiter remind us of what it was to be a ’90s human—on Earth.