It’s...[Bowman's] masterpiece—a sprawling, manic miracle of a book from a writer who never achieved the fame he long deserved ... It’s hard to explain the plot of Big Bang, because there really isn’t one; rather, there are dozens of plots, which Bowman juggles with an agility that’s breathtaking ... There are a hundred reasons why Big Bang shouldn’t work. Bowman has every opportunity to get carried away on tangents—early in the book, it’s easy to wonder whether this will end up as a novel-length shaggy-dog story—but he writes with a real focus, never abandoning any of the numerous plot lines that run through the book. His prose is elegant but stubbornly unshowy; he writes as if he were a documentarian, calmly reporting historical events with an assured and authoritative tone ... Bowman brings his characters to life the way only a novelist with real imagination can ... Bowman has a gift for drawing out the oddball in the celebrities he writes about, and the effect is sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious. Big Bang is a stunningly accomplished novel, both deeply American and deeply weird ... this is, after all, a work of fiction, and a vastly entertaining one at that.
If this review is beginning to seem encyclopedic in nature, it is simply mirroring the book. Big Bang resembles a baby boomer clearing house. Set between 1950 and 1963, there are moments when it seems intended to be a real-time account of the entire period. This creates a paradoxical sensation in the reading experience. Individual pages and the brief scenes zoom by; but somewhere around halfway through, this nearly 600-page book begins to feel endless. Bowman gets approximately 250 plates spinning in the air, and they mostly just keep spinning ... In all of [Bowman's] novels, there’s vitality, humor and imagination that deserve to be remembered.
Big Bang is a gripping pseudo-narrative: The structure is justified solely by the serendipity of all these events happening at once. Mr. Bowman takes what he has gathered from coincidence to construct a 'story' that pulls us onward via our fascination with the backstages of these celebrated humans, a sense of fatedness ... Mr. Bowman’s novel is broadly factual — the research implied is astounding — but with zestful imaginative leaps and crisply entertaining dialogue and description ... But Big Bang is more than brilliant mimicry. Mr. Bowman tips us early on that his themes include our struggle with the dead weight of history ... While Big Bang gets pretty baggy at times, it’s consistently involving and almost compulsively entertaining. But it’s got a bigger problem: Though tuned to the absurdity of machismo, Mr. Bowman is nonetheless magnetized by it. And quite unfortunately, most of his characters both major and minor are alpha white males.
It is big. It sprawls ... Fractured, disjunctive, this 'nonfiction novel' (as the author apparently dubbed it) does not proceed linearly but recursively, circling back to pet themes and incidents in obsessive fashion ... Right from the start, there’s something not quite right about Big Bang, something decidedly askew — and that, perhaps, is exactly as it was meant to be. No MFA workshop would ever approve this novel; it has the genuine veneer of outsider art ... It sports a fizziness and near-manic unpredictability, driven by a flurry of brief sections of the sort now in vogue with contemporary fiction (thank you, Twitter!) ... Ultimately, it is almost as if Bowman’s intent were to parody by exaggeration the penchant of so many contemporary novels to feature a 'celebrity' walk-on: nearly every named character in Big Bang is famous, or historically significant, or both. From the perch of our own teeming, TV-saturated present, it can be hard to parse the difference.
A kaleidoscopic portrait of America in the years leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy—and a chillingly prophetic vision of how we got to where we are ... Bowman articulates a vivid point of view in this novel, or, more accurately, a series of points of view ... Bowman is sly about acknowledging his inspirations: Mailer, as established in the opening, and also Don DeLillo ... And yet, to call the book derivative is to miss the point. Instead, it is sui generis, the kind of novel that invents its form out of its own frenzied convocation of voices and moments: the 20th century in all its majesty and fear. Bowman’s testament is both lament and celebration—for the betrayed promise of the United States as well as the tragedy of the author’s premature demise.
...big, bold, and brilliant ... Bowman...relates all of these remarkable tales with a straight-faced, just-the-facts approach, stripping these giants of the 20th century of their mythic status and rendering them as mere humans—caught, like everyone, in the crossfire of unrelenting history. Bowman’s self-described 'nonfiction novel' is a stunning and singular achievement.
