A free-wheeling, fast-paced hippie fantasy of one young man’s search for meaning in life.
Lojac’s picaresque debut novel offers the psychedelic adventures of an Everyman on a quest for enlightenment.
At one point in this dreamy, disjointed acid trip of a novel, the protagonist, Genetic Freeman, experiences a brief glimpse of an afterlife that’s standing room only: “I see Gods, demigods, devils, demons, gurus, swamis and saints,” he reports. “Nostradamus, Swedenborg, Ramakrishna, Rajneesh, Bhaktivedanta, the goddess Ishtar, and the great Shawnee Prophet....Madame Blavatsky, the Beast 666, Anton LaVey, Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith, Cagliostro, Meher Baba, Sai Baba, and the Maharishi.” The open-ended, all-inclusive nature of this list (Mary Baker Eddy?) is a good indication of the high-spirited, rambling tale Lojac tells here of young Genetic’s spiritual coming-of-age. He begins his journey in 1969 as a fairly typical hippie living near New York City’s Washington Square, listening to sitar music and reading things like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. As the story opens on his birthday, he meets a young woman named Allison, and they decide (before having pleased-to-meet-you sex) to travel to California and seek out the cool cats in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park. Allison moves up in the ranks of a quasi-cult called Psytron Theological Technology, while Genetic has a series of adventures that are very loosely strung together and may make more coherent sense to their author than they will to readers (as is often the case in this type of psychedelic bildungsroman). Genetic is admonished to “Figure out what you want,” but also told that “Your vision gets in the way of your vision”; his extra-dimensional encounters with beings like the Lizard Lady, who oversees “the industrial-size, between-lives processing facility,” are interspersed with the progress of his life as he grows older and takes a job teaching English in Japan. The book would have benefited from a thorough edit to eliminate distracting typos (“it’s” instead of “its”; “Holly” instead of “Holy”). However, its narrative gusto and preponderance of zippy dialogue (and frank sex) compensates, and will remind readers of a certain age of the culture clashes of their youth.
A free-wheeling, fast-paced hippie fantasy of one young man’s search for meaning in life.Pub Date: March 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9818604-3-5
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Think More Books
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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