South Africa of 2024. Recounting this breadth of
character, point of view,
and place — and there
are more — may sound
daunting, even exhausting, but in Doerr’s careful, empathetic prose,
the stories unfold easily
and surely.
Through all these
settings, and across the
memories of all these
characters, the natural
world is an insistent constant. Vivid interior characterizations are
interwoven with descriptions of weather
and the living landscape to evoke the
strong sense that human consciousness
is of a pattern with flowers seeding, insects metamorphosing, birds migrating,
clouds forming and unforming. All are
part of the grand interplay of our changing planet, of which any single person,
flower, insect, bird, or cloud can necessarily only see a small part. Yet Memory
Wall, with its great narrative distances
and the richness of its imagination, allows us a farther vision.
—Phil Condon
Packing for Mars
BY MARY ROACH
W. W. Norton, 2010. $25.95, 336 pages.
lIkE HER pREvIOuS bOOkS exploring
cadavers, coitus, and the afterlife, Mary
Roach’s Packing for Mars o=ers lots of
taboo-busting fun, this time on the sub-
ject of space travel. The book answers the
questions the world’s four-year-olds have
about space flight—what do astronauts
eat? how do astronauts pee?—and some
that they probably haven’t thought of yet:
Can you get it on in zero gravity? How ex-
actly do you die if your spacecraft breaks up
at thirty-four hundred miles an hour? Does
orbit make a man’s pe-
nis look bigger? What’s
it like to view your own
anus through a closed-
circuit toilet-cam? (Ac-
tually, they may have
thought of that last one,
but unlike NASA, they
don’t have the technol-
ogy to answer it.)
Columbia rained down in shards across
the nation: is spaceflight worth it? Why go
to all the trouble of launching ourselves
into an inhospitable place when our home
planet suits us so well? The question pervades the book’s wacky anecdotes like a
pair of sweaty socks in the corner of the
International Space Station, until Roach
poses it. Wouldn’t that money and e=ort,
she asks in the last chapter, be better spent
on Earth?
Interestingly, her answer is no. The
reasons she gives in her summary seem
insu;cient—money is squandered on
more foolish things, like war, and the
exploratory urge driving the space program is somehow ennobling. The book
makes a better argument as it recounts
the myriad ways scientists have grappled
with the limitations imposed on our machine dreams by the animal realities of the
body. The more we seek to transcend our
earthbound carcasses, it seems, the more
we come face to face with their demands.
We hurled ourselves into space on physics and fossil fuels and
wound up staring into a
black hole — the human
anus.
In the end, even as
Roach makes her claim
for continuing the space
program, Packing for Mars
draws our attention to
Earth, and how well it an-
swers our annoying, but
persistent, needs. Reading
about defecation bags,
tube food, motion sick-
ness, reprocessed urine,
and a space-induced psychosis called
“Earth-out-of-view phenomenon,” it’s clear
space travel fosters the same appreciation.
“Only in space do you understand what
incredible happiness it is just to walk,”
former cosmonaut Alexander Laveikin
tells Roach. “To walk on Earth.”
—Ginger Strand
