by William S. Burroughs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1987
The conclusion of a trilogy incorporating Cities of the Red Night (1981) and The Place of Dead Roads (1984)—and, like its predecessors, a chaotic, sometimes nauseating, fitfully funny melange of gore, sexual perversion, and surreal science fiction. For once, Burroughs begins in a sedate minor key: William S. Hall, an old writer living on welfare who "forty years ago. . .had published a novel which had made a stir," lies on his bed "watching grids of typewritten words in front of his eyes." Presumably, Hall is modeled on Burroughs; one settles in for some poignant autobiography. No such luck. In less time than it takes to say "avant-garde," the narrative decays into gibber-speak: "He unscrewed capitalism, snake shedding its skin. Change terminal. Bought a ticket to offer a chance of outhouse. Hour souls." But the industrious literary sleuth can discern a plot line here, something about a search for the Western Lands beyond the Land of the Dead, where immortality awaits. Kim Carson, Hassan i Sabbah, and other reptilian misfits from earlier Burroughs novels stir the murky soup, which bubbles up chunks of Egyptian mythology, Reichian psychology, drug lore, futuristic vision (the president hunkers in an underground bunker), biological mutation (Burroughs believes that genetic experimentation may be our species' salvation), blasts at book reviewers, and oodles of info about centipede venom. Lots of great quirky ideas here; but the imagery is repellent and the delivery helter-skelter from—some may feel—the Hieronymus Bosch of fiction.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1987
ISBN: 0140094563
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1987
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by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 2001
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an...
Desperation outstrips the satire in Everett's latest exercise in narrative wizardry (Glyph, 1999, etc.), as a lonely African-American writer faces private torment and instant fame when his parody of ghetto literature is taken as the real deal.
His own generation's version of an invisible man, Thelonious Ellison, a.k.a. Monk, is a largely unknown academic novelist who visits hometown Washington, D.C., to give a paper and see his mother and sister. No sooner does he return to California than Sis, a doctor in an abortion clinic, is shot dead at work. Someone has to take care of Mom, who's showing the first wrenching signs of Alzheimer's, so Monk returns home. There, his frustration with a runaway bestseller written in ghettospeak by a bourgeois black woman after visiting Harlem for a couple of days is fueled by endless rejections of his own new manuscript; in a rage he pumps out a parody and sends it under a pseudonym to his agent—who promptly secures a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal. Stunned that no one recognizes his book as a send-up, Monk refuses to let his true identity be known. Meanwhile, he must cope with his mother's rapid decline, his gay brother's sudden animosity, and the discovery among his father's papers of letters indicating not only that Dad had a white mistress long ago, but that Monk has a half-sister his age. Struggling to maintain his own identity as his creation looms larger than life and his family redefines itself, he makes choices that render him invisible no more.
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an already substantial literary career.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2001
ISBN: 1-58465-090-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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