ALAN MENDELSOHN, THE BOY FROM MARS

by Daniel M. Pinkwater ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 1979

Like Lizard Music, this Hogboro adventure begins realistically and little by little has readers assenting to such outlandish phenomena as a junior high school student body rioting over whether fellow student Alan Mendelsohn is or is not a Martian, a birdbrain psychiatrist becoming unhinged by Hyperstellar Archaeology in the Bermuda Triangle Chile Parlor, a brass potato from the moon being given up in trade for a full set of Wonder Wombat comic books, a motorcycle-riding Venusian folk singer writing a Japanese-English dictionary which contains the Key to Interplanar Existential Communication, and several different planes of existence occupying the same space--and converging in the overgrown Hergeschleimer's Oriental Gardens behind a Hogboro junkyard. The story begins when Leonard Neeble ""a short, portly, wrinkled kid with glasses,"" moves unhappily to a new neighborhood but soon makes friends with Alan Mendelsohn, another weird new kid at Bat Masterson Junior High School. Soon Leonard and Alan have attained State Twenty-six with used-book-dealer Samuel Klugarsh's crackpot, cabalistic Mind Control System, and thus can mentally command mindless people to do silly things and bricks to rise into the air. These tricks soon grow boring, however, and then Venusian Clarence Yojimbo, whom they meet in the Chile Parlor, explains that ""the point of State Twenty-six is not to make yourself into a radio transmitter--but to make yourself into a radio receiver."" After that intriguing suggestion, the boys' subsequent adventure in the existential plane of Waka-Waka might be a bit of a let-down philosophically, but Leonard's ultimate happy-ending adjustment back at Bat Masterson is his own show, and unlike any other. Throughout Pinkwater gets away with long explanatory conversations because the conversations are so ridiculous and the explanations so wild--dizzying in their ever-expanding revelation, pure Pinkwater in their spacey view of our existential plane.

Pub Date: May 8, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION