THE BURNING WOMEN OF FAR CRY

by Rick DeMarinis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 19, 1986

This year's winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for his collection of stories, Under the Wheat (p. 1227), here extends his vision of white trash life as nasty, brutish, and short in a novel that's both shapeless and pointless, with an excess of vulgarity thrown in for good measure. DeMarinis' violent, booze-sodden narrative asks the question, ""Why act like we give a fat fuck?"" and answers in its final sentence, ""Why fucken not?"" Indeed the low-lifes and no-accounts who people this episodic tale seldom escape ""the chain of fuck-ups"" that determines their miserable existences. Nor do they ever leave Far Cry, the obscure little town of no discernible state or region, where this entire novel unfolds. That's particularly true of Jack, the trapped young narrator, who at one point decides that ""the human condition"" is as ""entertaining as hell."" At least he's amused. Readers may find his domestic and sexual traumas less than zany, and the people in his life less than the sympathetic assortment of oddballs they're intended to be. Like Jack, they're mostly unappealing combatants in the all-out war between the sexes--a war that's at the heart and soul of this mean book. His mother, Jade Marie, has driven two men, including Jack's father, to suicide. Much of the novel chronicles her brazen affair with the thuggish employee of her third husband, Gent Mundy, a likable lug who owns a successful creamery. By the end of the novel, he's institutionalized, thinking himself a saxaphone, and his usurper, Guy Rampling, who has run the business into the ground, has also gone nuts. Jack's slutty mom has taken up with a local poet, and his homy sister--an Einstein groupie who also dreams of ""superhumanly large sex organs""--abandons science for marriage to a grease jockey. Through all this, Jack's either loaded, a habit he took up at 13, or aroused, a condition relieved with whomever's handy, sister and friend's wife included. This black comedy is more often a latrine green farce.

Pub Date: Nov. 19, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Arbor House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION