OPERATION BLUE LIGHT

Unfocused portrait of a young man stumbling through first jobs, young loves, voices in his head, mental institutions, a supposed engagement to Chairman Mao’s granddaughter and a cadre of Cold War psychics.

Attempting to synthesize a series of confusing events from his youth–what he considers his psychic awakening as an adolescent–Chabot employs a jarring array of coming-of-age episodes, conspiracy theories and radical leaps of logic. These exertions only muddy his central thesis–that the author’s inexplicable extrasensory perception was monitored, and possibly engendered, by a secret U.S. government program designed to combat psychic espionage by Communist China and the Soviet Union. The first two-thirds of the book, concerning Chabot’s young adulthood, feels cobbled together with tangential episodes amid periodic nods toward his burgeoning ESP, which resembles amateur ham radio conversations without the hardware. Superfluous details and inconsistent tone–the author jumps clumsily between the quotidian (his propensity for Coca-Cola) and the fantastic (a satisfyingly tense encounter with a Man in Black)–further obscure the novel’s storyline and theme. Significant events occur without plausible cause; neither his engagement to Chairman Mao’s granddaughter nor his psychic ability, both fundamental to the plot, feel convincingly developed. Coherence drifts away as readers fall deeper into the rabbit hole, and the narrative culminates in a confusing psychic contact/long-distance phone call to China via a group of possible Soviet psychic agents. By this point, readers are lost. It’s just too hard to believe Chabot contacted a secret group of Eastern Bloc psychics to renege on an already legally suspect international marriage contract mediated by his college roommate. Besides, the author gives readers little evidence to suspect he’s in danger, since these titular psychic spies act like confused interns rather than experienced Cold War agents. Chabot likewise paints a confusing personal portrait. Is he an innocent kid from Indiana tampering with strange psychic powers? Is he a scrappy pawn in a secret government program? His arrogance toward other psychics, and the FBI and CIA agents who eventually interview him, stand in marked contrast to his deference to his father and other authority figures. This smacks of posturing and it, too, is difficult to swallow. Whether or not readers accept Chabot’s intrinsic sincerity, few will accept his narrative.

Uneven in tone, implausible in execution.