When you crack open a ’70s sci-fi/fantasy paperback like On Wings of Song, you expect to slip into a world wholly unlike your own. For an Iowan living through Inauguration Week 2025, this particular novel isn’t too much of an escape — and not just because it’s set in Iowa and penned by a Des Moines native, Thomas M. Disch (1940-2008). On Wings of Song is so vivacious, so brutal and so bonkers that it just might, by its very insistence on confronting unpleasantries, give you a jolt of energy in the bleak here and now.
I owe my initial exposure to Disch to the novelist and critic Scott Bradfield’s YouTube channel (the channel’s premise is reading “Great Books in the Bathtub”). I’m grateful for the introduction. In this and his other novels (like The Priest, his outrageous homage to the lurid anti-Catholicism of Gothic fiction), Disch is the real bird: an unduly neglected American writer.
Set mostly in a near-future Iowa ruled by an ultraconservative tinpot regime, the novel is a bildungsroman following misfit “Amesville” native Daniel Weinreb. On Wings of Song follows Daniel from his paperboy adolescence to his eventual, very strange fate in the elite world of Manhattan Bel canto opera, which is divided over its loyalties to rival castrati. (They bring the castrati back in the future.)
Daniel winds up there because he wanted to learn how to sing, and he wanted to sing because, in the fantasy America of the novel, people who can sing with particular passion and sincerity can fall into a state of “flying.” Flying is a kind of out-of-body projection that allows the consciousness of the flier to sail about the Earth invisibly. It is an experience said to produce great ecstasy.
Naturally, the government of Iowa, in its a priori opposition to pleasure, polices this manner of flight ruthlessly. It can land you in a prison camp, specifically one built near the town of Spirit Lake. The detainees of Spirit Lake have bombs implanted in their bodies, which automatically detonate if they stray beyond the camp’s perimeter.
Prison sentences in Iowa are lengthened and annulled by open-secret fiat of the state’s bigwigs, among them a reactionary, “pilgrimish” Anglophile named Grandison Whiting. He lives in an enormous ferro-concrete castle called Worry, in the English manner of estate-naming. What was once the town of Williamsburg has been converted into a feudal favela in the shadow of Worry, peopled by neoserfs. Grandison, can you believe it, has a beautiful daughter. Eventually, young Daniel has reason to believe that Grandison may want him dead. A tremendous amount of plot ensues, all in Daniel’s pursuit of flight by music.
The covers for On Wings of Song are plentiful and as varied as the publishers that printed them. 
The covers for On Wings of Song are plentiful and as varied as the publishers that printed them. 
The covers for On Wings of Song are plentiful and as varied as the publishers that printed them. 
The covers for On Wings of Song are plentiful and as varied as the publishers that printed them.
The targets of the novel’s satire are not only conservatives. In the novel’s Manhattan, it becomes trendy among affluent white liberals, fascinated by Blackness, to undergo surgical skin-darkening to appear Black. These people are called “phoneys,” said to be derived from the French faux noir. Shallow claims to appreciation thus give license to callous appropriation.
The sheer brio with which the white, gay Disch plunges into this bit may give some readers pause. Is this his joke to make? This is a fair and important question, which I leave to Little Village‘s intelligent readers to answer for themselves. I would make two contributions on the topic. The first is to note, on the one hand, that the novel does not evince deep historical interest in the actual facts of minstrel performance, and so could plausibly be seen as exploiting the shock value of the subject, albeit in a self-consciously campy way. On the other hand, that minstrelsy is the novel’s most extreme metaphor for the profound damages wrought by personal inauthenticity, which corrupts the soul and rots a society’s political and moral order. The point is the debasement that ensues from glib impersonation.
The idea that personal authenticity is a prerequisite for good art is the novel’s big theme, and the book’s passages on this topic are among its most moving. More than the plot’s antics, which are sometimes overmuch, it is the propulsive joie de vivre of the narrative voice that makes this book an achievement. That voice rings clearest on the subject of song:
Flight […] took place at the moment when the two discrete hemispheres of the brain stood in perfect equipoise, stood and were sustained. For the brain was a natural gnostic, split into those very dichotomies of semantic sense and linguistically unmediated perception, of words and music, that were the dichotomies of song. This was why, though the attempt had been made so often, no other musicians, but only singers, could strike that delicate balance in their art that mirrored an answering, arcane balance in the tissues of the mind.
The result of this “arcane balance” is “the fountain of art”: music as a “process that renews itself moment by moment,” always “willing” to inhabit “this instant, and not just willing, and not even desirous, but delighted: an endless, seamless inebriation of song.”
Song, and all art by the proxy of song, is the good, vulnerable thing that Disch so wants to protect against the villains he revels in lampooning. The book is a pulsating, wide-awake enjoinment to enjoyment. In a lecture on literary translation, the novelist and political essayist Arundhati Roy raised the idea that different novels might have different designated enemies. If Disch’s 1979 novel has an enemy, it is silence.
