THE STUNT MAN

by Paul Brodeur ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 11, 1970

The Stunt Man is a dazzling piece of high wire artistry: the stunt man, always up in tire air, is the professional fall guy or the eternal victim; he is also Cameron, a fugitive from a broken down army bus who--running from a car on the road and a helicopter overhead--lands in a honkytonk playland where they are making a film. He becomes the fugitive of the film. Mr. Brodeur, a highly original writer (The Sick Fox -- 1963) tells this story in a circular continuity of jumpshifts, superimpositions, turnabouts and reverses, always with the double images of words and ideas. If for some it may be too obscura a camera, it zeroes in on concurrent and recurrent stories within stories, distortions and contradictions which are part Kafkaesque--part Keystone Kop sequence. Thus Cameron, forced to perform one stunt after another, trapped in the ""kind of ending that's endless,"" finds himself confused between life and art, or art and life, and perhaps it's one and the same. But it's also ""a had movie we can't get up and walk out of."" . . . A startling extension of the mind's eye into the reaches of the imagination which teases the reader with all kinds of patterns, parallels and alternatives and also suggests that the world is perhaps never as real as the terror which lies below or beyond it.

Pub Date: March 11, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION