When a TV reporter asked media mogul Ted Turner what he thought of the Heaven's Gate suicides in March 1997, Turner shot back, "It's a good way to get rid of a few nuts." The cult's leader, Marshall Applewhite, and 38 disciples had seized on the Hale-Bopp comet as their long-awaited cue to quit this world, convinced that a UFO was trailing the comet and would take them from Southern California to paradise. Then again, Turner added that he couldn't see much difference between that belief and more commonplace notions of "going up to heaven."
Readers who can appreciate Turner's skeptical take on spiritual matters will find much to savor in Trey Ellis's third novel, Right Here, Right Now (Simon & Schuster, 1999; $23). Ellis, '84, satirizes New Age gurus and their devotees, while demonstrating that the distance between extremist "nuts" and run-of-the-mill motivational speakers isn't as great as one might think.
Take Ashton Robinson. At first, Ellis's protagonist seems more Dale Carnegie than Marshall Applewhite. Robinson has built an empire called Personal Empowerment Systems Inc. Through infomercials, videotapes and seminars, he suavely peddles platitudes like "get your ego back" and "things don't just happen, you make them happen." It's The Power of Positive Thinking for generations Me and X.
Robinson, a Yale-educated, multilingual jet-setter who comes from a black working-class family in Flint, Mich., is a con artist with panache. But as the story's first-person narrator, he admits as much, and there is something oddly redeeming in that. His cynical running commentary (captured through the all-too-believable fiction of 135 diarylike microcassette tapes recovered by the FBI) is precisely the instrument with which Ellis skewers the self-improvement industry.
Robinson amuses himself at training sessions by seeing if he can get his clients to record in their notebooks increasingly insignificant factoids -- like the color of the house where he was born. One exception to his scorn: beautiful women who are slightly skeptical of him and his program.
Less than halfway through the book, everything changes. Robinson has an epiphany -- or at least an extended hallucination -- brought on by a mix of marijuana, a midnight swim and a bottle of expired cough syrup. In this wild episode, a Brazilian midget (male) saves Robinson from drowning, then morphs into a voluptuous sex playmate (female) and, for good measure, points him on the road to somewhere between Jonestown and Heaven's Gate.
Having been "enlightened," Robinson abandons his self-help empire and retreats to his mansion in Santa Cruz, Calif., with the dozen or so disciples who are willing to follow him in his quest for transcendence. He concocts the new religion as he goes along, cobbling together bits of Buddhism, Scientology, tarot and hypnotism. There's no mass suicide, just a surfeit of sex for Robinson and the women -- and celibacy for their husbands.
Unfortunately, this is all fueled by expired cough syrup and red wine, and the guru's narration grows incoherent to the point of tedium. It's a relief when Ed Bradley exposes the cult on 60 Minutes and the game is up.
A larger problem for Ellis is that successful satire must belittle its subject by making it ridiculous. But in the case of targets like the Heaven's Gate and Jonestown suicides, reality -- death by Kool-Aid, website farewell notes -- is easily as preposterous as anything a novelist can imagine, and so the parody loses some of its punch. Moreover, many readers will consider both incidents off-limits for laughs. Ellis, on entertainingly solid ground before his protagonist's swimming-pool sea-change, may have gone off the deep end when Robinson did.
