A boozy, grungy, alt-rock fable that might as well have a soundtrack by The Replacements.
A dejected bartender pursues his recently returned ex through the dive bars of New York City.
This messy little novella is the latest creative collaboration between writer Lipez, designer Wakefield, and photographer and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Zinner (Please Take Me off the Guest List, 2010). The story itself is little more than a nihilistic chronicle of confused young love in the subterranean lairs of New York City. That said, the narrator’s painfully honest voice, Zinner’s evocative photographs, and the rich graphic design lend the package a funky mood that recalls Douglas Coupland’s early works. Lipez’s ongoing day job as a bartender also helps relay a stylish authenticity to what is essentially one long bar crawl. Our narrator is Sam, aforementioned bartender, who’s in a bit of a rut after having been dumped by Vicki, “my one true love, ender of marriages and my heart.” After leaving Sam, Vicki has been going to AA meetings to get her life together. But when Sam gets wind that she’s drinking again, he recruits his horndog best friend, Francis, for a careening drug- and alcohol-fueled quest to win back her heart. Along with occasional cameos from Sam’s acerbic ex-wife, Aviva, the duo encounters all manner of miscreants, iconoclasts, and other aberrations, all punctuated by miniexhibits by Zinner with titles like “Eleven Moments on the Way to Somewhere Else” and “Seven Moments of Clarity.” Don’t bother looking for the absent moral of the story; just enjoy Lipez’s spare prose and dry wit, framed by Zinner’s sly photography. “Everybody I’d ever cared for was truly taking it to the hoop tonight,” Sam says near the end. “Was it a full moon? I ran my hand through my hair and it came back wet. Beer and vodka and snow.”
A boozy, grungy, alt-rock fable that might as well have a soundtrack by The Replacements.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-667-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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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