THE TIME TRIP

by Rob Swigart ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 1979

Swigart's broad, taffy-pull cartoon novels often involve someone being launched somewhere--and this one has Barney Gamesh, computer engineer, going back in time to rescue his wife Penny, who disintegrated herself suicidally inside a microwave oven. With help from a teenage genius named Josh and a positron-rebound theory called The Rubber Band Effect, Barney finds himself flung back to Mesopotamia. Penny, after initial staging at Holiday Inn Deathwest, has been reincarnated as Punumma, a love priestess in Sumer. Barney, arriving on the scene, is re-named Enkidu, becomes friends with Gilgamesh, who is more like Anthony Quinn than a mythic king: ""gusty and lusty and pure pudding underneath."" And, amid all the travel in and out of eons and dimensions and the retellings of myth, there are the predictable satirical potshots at cryogenics, est, and the CIA. Swigart has three or four rings in operation at all times, none of them much more consequential than another, but all light, all in motion--so this is just nicely silly and far less irritating than his previous work.

Pub Date: April 10, 1979

ISBN: 0595170838

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION