Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 2003: Casebook Study of Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

Unknown, Author

Dalkey Archive Press

Point Counter Point

<p>The dilettantes who frequent lady tantamounts society parties are determined to push forward the moral frontiers of the age marjorie has left her family to live with walter; walter is in love with the luscious but cold-hearted lucy who devours every man in sight; the repulsive spandrell deflowers young girls for the sake of entertainment and all the while everyone is engaged in dazzling and witty conversation</p>

Literature & Fiction

HUXLEY, ALDOUS

Nicholas Mosley (introduction)

Contemporary

The (Diblos) Notebook

MERRILL, JAMES

Splendide-Hôtel

Arthur Rimbaud's invented "Splendide-Hotel," "built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night," provides the occasion for Sorrentino's imaginative meditation on letters and language. Each chapter serves as an opportunity for the author to expand on thoughts and images suggested by a letter of the alphabet, as well as to reflect upon the workings of the imagination, particularly in the art of William Carlos Williams and Arthur Rimbaud. Reminiscent of the philosophical treatise/poem "On Being Blue" by William H. Glass, "Splendide-Hotel" is a Grand Hotel of the mind, splendidly conceived.

SORRENTINO, GILBERT

CREELEY, Robert

Literary

United States

Season at Coole

<p>Coole"" is a country, a madhouse, cloud-cuckooland. . . a family. An incredible, disgusting, glorious family of Long Island Irish psychotic drunken dreamers, natural communists and slobs. And this book, a love-hate song to them, becomes an upside-down accordion riff on the whole idea of family or tribe, ethnic and American. The Cooles have imported the rich Irish madness and the two curses of babies and drink (though the younger half of the nine kids prefer grass and acid). There's father Leland, all tyrannous illogic; mother Rose, who lies drunk in the dirty laundry, confessing to the Virgin; Leland Jr., obscenely fat, murderous, pathetic and paranoiac (but in high school ""he could make a leper ring his bell with laughter""); sickly Emmet, skinny alley-cat of the underworld; Sandra-Sam who looks Italian and runs with tattooed hoodlums; and quite a few more. They have gracious Kennedy-family fantasies, they write on the walls, they wet their beds, they have incestuous and homicidal (especially patricidal) fantasies about each other and about their crazy redheaded aunts (nicknamed Quif and Quire). To a man they dream of escape, yet are fatally bound to the house which Mickey Mack, the writer son and eye of the storm, calls ""a museum, literally, of natural history"" -- a kind of inverse, perverse health in the midst of suburban cancer. A bravura novel, funny and wild (or distasteful?) and language is its pole star, language that careens with a mad sweet Irish lilt. ―Kirkus Reviews</p>

Stephens, Michael

Like Melies's film The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza gives us a hero, Desmond, who finds himself caught between two worlds, the night before and the morning after, the past and the present, the world that is and the world that was. First published in Ireland in 1958, this fantastic excursion of the mind, which moves between Dublin and Dundalk on a train headed for the scrap heap after fifty years, also reminds the reader of Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and At Swim-Two-Birds. But while Leopold Bloom is peripatetic in his Dublin Odyssey, Cusack's Desmond locks himself in train carriage 304D and orders out—sandwiches, whiskey, and beer. A brilliant tour de force melding time, place, and memory.

Cadenza

Cusack, Ralph

First published in Ireland in 1958, this fantastic excursion of the mind, which moves between Dublin and Dundalk on a train headed for the scrap heap after fifty years, also reminds the reader of Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and At Swim-Two-Birds. But while Leopold Bloom is peripatetic in his Dublin Odyssey, Cusack's Desmond locks himself in train carriage 304D and orders out sandwiches, whiskey, and beer. A brilliant tour de force melding time, place, and memory.

Cadenza (Science)

Wall to Wall (American Literature)

Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's subcultures, ?"Wall to Wall"?traces a modern?Ulysses?in reverse: from a West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views roadside America from its weak side--the tough underbelly of the Southwest, Tucson, the Rio Grande, Nogales, The Border--before thrusting himself into Okie's sacred shrine, Oklahoma City, and into the staid Eastern Corridor that ends in Boston. Claude's vehicle is a '59 Thunderhead, a "female beast," which his father, a used-car dealer in L.A., has commissioned him to deliver to Oklahoma City. And like all of Woolf's cars, the Thunderhead is a "she," a domineering companion in Claude's cross-country picaresque "flight of passage." In "Wall to Wall" Woolf's view is evocative and is very much his own. First published by Grove Press in 1962, "Wall to Wall" has been an underground classic for over thirty-five years, a comic and satiric masterpiece.

Woolf, Douglas

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