The premise held promise, but I think Mezrich fumbled this one. Sex on the Moon is too excited about telling convicted moon rock thief Thad’s story and not interested enough in informing the reader about anything in particular. If the story had enough juice to support a novel, it might have been worth it, but Thad is a poor fit for a hero and his story isn’t a heroic journey, or even a very good yarn.
The initial promise of a moon rock heist as a heist story is dashed fairly quickly; this seems like as much as an insider threat crime of opportunity committed by a habitual swiper as it is a proper caper. To summarize it: A couple of NASA Interns showed up at NASA with a dolly, stole a safe full of tiny moon rocks from a favorite processor’s office, and proceeded to try and sell them to an FBI agent. You don’t want to read a book about a bank robbery committed by a bank teller unless it’s told in a particularly compelling way (it isn’t) or it tells us something interesting about our world (I would argue that this does not.)
It’s written like a novel (interspersed with absolutely atrocious blank verse-presumably excerpted from Thad’s returned-to-sender jailhouse love letters to his accomplice) but heroes are usually expected to change or grow in some way. He starts the story casually stealing from his employer and ends the story after a jail sentence for stealing from another employer. There’s no sense that he has learned anything about right and wrong or trust or greed. His apology in court was barely a step from ‘it’s just a prank bro.’
It’s important for true crime writing, if it wants to be remotely tasteful, to make sure there’s empathy for the victims of the crime. There’s very little here. I wish he’d gone into what the effects were on the culture of NASA after the heist. Did interns still enjoy the same level of access? Is it still a viable pathway to an Astronaut career? Did they implement new security procedures? The scientist who’s safe NASA Intern thad and his co-conspirators stole testified in court that he left precious notebooks that represented thirty years of work in the safe and they were never recovered, but we don’t hear that in Thad’s telling. His co-conspirators told the FBI that Thad insisted they throw the notebooks out!
And that’s really the crux of the problem. The story puts us in the Perp’s head for the most part. The book is interesting enough when he’s describing how fun it is to be a NASA Intern and barely worth reading when he’s describing his head over heels plunge into adultery with a coworker. We don’t get a whole lot of empathy for his wife either, just his side of the story about how her… career was getting in the way of their relationship? Despite the fact that he of course moved out of state to chase a highly unlikely dream of becoming an astronaut and then threw it away for a life of crime. I suppose the book is trying to answer the question “what would drive a man with so much going his way to risk it all?” But the best answer we get is ‘he is very bad as gauging risk and engages in lots of risky behavior’ or ‘Thad, who seems to be telling the story, doesn’t want you to think that he was just greedy.’
I don’t believe Thad. He tells an improbable story of using a Hollywood chemistry trick to steal the keypad combination to gain access to the facility he stole from. I suspect one of the conspirators was leaked the code, and Thad lied to the author to protect that source. Why the author pointed it, I don’t know. We don’t know if there was any physical evidence for this story. The names of the co-conspirators are changed even though they’re a matter of public record. What journalistic purpose did that serve, besides (I assume) help assuage the guilt of the perpetrator? These make it difficult to take any of the facts in the book at face value. As a work of journalism it’s frightfully compromised.
As a yarn it’s frayed. It certainly kept me turning the pages to see what stupid mistake Thad would make next, but the sympathy left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s salaciousness wasn’t offset by any other qualities; it reads, partly, as a really weird love letter to a person who clearly no longer wants anything to do with the narrator. Skip this one and read the Atlantic article linked above instead.
