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Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
I had the pleasure of reviewing Tom McCarthy’s new novel, Satin Island, for the Los Angeles Times. I had a lot to say about this book and had to cut the review back. I think McCarthy says some interesting things about the direction we’re headed and it’s not pretty.
McCarthy’s style is at times reminiscent of David Foster Wallace’s stories of characters caught in the gears of consumer capitalism coupled with the whimsy of Jean Philippe Toussaint’s literary situational comedies in which every detail is microanalyzed. “Satin Island” also owes something to the dot-com-era work novel; an air of catastrophic contemporaneousness hangs over the proceedings as U. is sustained by and trapped in a system he knows cannot possibly last. “The Company’s logo was a giant crumbling tower. It was Babel, of course, the old Biblical parable.”
Read the rest of the review. You might also enjoy this interview at Vulture.
Blake Butler’s 300,000,000
Blake Butler isn’t for everyone. His work is at the front of a particular subset of indie lit marked by dark, masculine, unsentimental, unapologetically experimental prose. His latest book, 300,000,000, is a vertiginous decent into a nightmarish America.
[His] influences read like an encyclopedia of depravity: Dennis Cooper’s teen killers, the cryptic blather of “True Detective’s” Reggie Ledoux, Harmony Korine’s unscripted portraits of freaks and weirdos and the remorseless cruelty of Jim Goad’s serial killer zine, Answer Me!
I read the book during one feverish, unseasonably warm week in San Diego. I didn’t have a fever, I wasn’t sick per se, but this book changed me. While I was reading it I felt like Blake’s dark vision was serving as a kind of conduit for all of America’s many sicknesses. I felt polluted and provoked. One thing that concerns me about the book is that I think that it could prove to be exceptionally troubling for individuals with less than optimal brain health, i.e. I believe that for some troubled readers this book could trigger a psychotic break. I can’t imagine what it cost Butler to write prose like this:
And with each failure, the same reversal of electricity came sucking through me, evacuating, leaving marked back in my blood another hope I’d given away in the name of nothing.
You can read the rest of my review in the Los Angeles Times.
Addicted to… Cats?
In celebration of Bill Burroughs’ birthday month I wrote a pair of reviews about the drug-loving author of Naked Lunch. First I tackled Barry Miles’ new biography, Call Me Burroughs, a fascinating examination of all phases of the author’s life.
“Call Me Burroughs” is riddled with weird anecdotes laced with gallows humor, bizarre coincidences and profane punch lines. It’s a massive undertaking made complicated by Burroughs’ peripatetic lifestyle and rampant drug use.
Then I took a look at a book that El Hombre Invisible wrote late in life called The Cat Inside.
I’m not sure what’s stranger—that Bill Burroughs, the godfather of punk, lifetime dope addict and firearms fetishist, wrote a book about his cats or that, in it, you’ll find lines like this:
“… [A] scarlet orange and green cat with reptile skin, a long sinewy neck and poison fangs—the venom is related to the blue-ringed octopus: two steps you fall on your face, an hour later you’re dead…”
That’s classic Burroughs at his hardboiled finest. But cats? Seriously?
Seriously.