My Planets: A Fictive Memoir

In common with the memoirs of many of other adoptees, Reiter’s also brings out the insecurity the process almost necessarily involves and the long-standing question, “Why was I given up?” Luckily, Reiter’s adoptive parents were by-and-large supportive, though the death of his father when Reiter was only 11 was clearly a setback.

Reiter grew up in one of the poorer areas of Cleveland, Ohio, where he seems to have been one of the very few white kids in a black neighbourhood. A further isolation was that there were very few Jews in the suburb. His frustrations in this context and well brought out and there is a child-like envy of some of his (adoptive) relatives who live in the richer, white part of town. Reiter’s treatment of this early part of his life is almost a bilungsroman, albeit told in fragments.

What is equally remarkable, however, is the author’s more difficult attempt to capture the life and personality of the birth parents he never knew when young. The social context in the United States cities at the end of World War II is graphically brought out, including the sexual recklessness of the time and the psychological damage experienced by veterans, even by those who (like Reiter’s birth father) didn’t see combat. In prose sections like “What a Girl’s Got to Do” and “Dancing Sinatra”, Reiter very convincingly recreates a sense of a woman who is drawn to sexual adventure and who feels that a more luminous fate should await her than her circumstances allow. It’s hard to know how much of this material Reiter heard directly from his mother after he met her again and how much he fictionalised from the raw data his birth family must have supplied after the reunion. In either case, it’s done with both an understanding of the times and considerable empathy and affection.

Some readers may wonder why the book is so consciously fragmented and perhaps why Reiter has arranged his material in terms of the planets of our solar system (and the classical myths associated with them). A part explanation might be that the materials of his book are either remembered in fragments or came to him later in that manner.

Another, perhaps, is to give the story of his early life (and those of his relatives, biological and adoptive) a wider resonance, to place himself and them in more universal context. Some may consider the dramatic monologues spoken by some of the planets as distractions from the “real” story but, as Reiter’s concise outlines of some of their associated myths implies, our human behaviours are often influenced by factors well beyond our own knowledge and/or control (including the eternal patterns of mythology).

My Planets is also available from the publisher as an enhanced eBook, which pushes the fragmentation principle even further by adding more images, sound, music and film. –Geoff Page, The Canberra Times

IP released his novel Liars and Lovers in 2003, and The Greenhouse Effect, a junior novel in the Project Earth-mend Series is now, in its 2nd edition, being developed into a film.

He’s completed a full-length DVD film of Hemingway in Spain. Real Guns is a children’s picture book illustrated by Irish artist Patrick Murphy. Global Cooling, a sequel to The Greenhouse Effect, was released in 2008. His most recent works are Primary Instinct, a satire on primary school education, Tiger Tames the Min Min, the third Project Earth-mend novel and the short film Nullarbor Song Cycle.