GODD

An incredibly pretentious and absolutely unreadable mishmash of moral, historical, sociological, and aesthetic philosophizing between Godd, who is you-know-who, and Ionel, Godd's collaborator and physical agent (Godd has no body) on earth. The main topic of conversation is the partnership (which begins in Jerusalem in 1948 and ends some twenty-odd years later in America) on the self-same book, and, secondarily women, on whom the future of western civilization depends. Outside of some rather verbose pornography, there is no narration, just chitchat, either abstract or about characters we otherwise never see, plus occasional ""documents"" written by Ionel's lovers or his lovers' lovers (those ""written"" in 1948 ""foretelling"" the late '60's with admirable hindsight), only made worse by the author's total self-consciousness: ""We'll write in the beginning about what we'll do later on, and make a book the way we write today, about how the book came into being. . . ."" ""Not a new novel of the novel, please!"" Amen.