Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972)

This lovable mess is a really good illustration of everything that was delightful and horrible about the absurdist avant-garde of the middle of the last century. The first half of the book bears a vague resemblance to a conventional novel, albeit mostly as a framework for some luscious prose poems which set about explicating the human condition and its relationship with the divine. Its skeletal plot narrates a surreal motorcade across America which features numerous oddballs including Jesus and Hitler. The second half of the book brings these characters and their caprices up occasionally, but is increasingly dominated by nonsensical strings of words, sometimes presented as aphorisms, sometimes as just plain lists, and sporadic chapter titles, admittedly very droll, for proposed novels. Some problems which this book may contain for contemporary readers include its considerable length--its modest page count conceals rather fine print and the nonsensical portions especially are pretty slow going. The book is fraught with violence and somewhat misogynistic sex which I found disturbing and which probably will downright offend the politically correct, and the author;s heartfelt but haywire Christianity which will surely offend some, particularly the devout. There are also more than a few literary parlor tricks such as parallel texts running in the margins, an annoyance which I found quite offputting. He chews his cud far too much on old-fashioned antiwar-cum-Marxist rants which are typical of the thirties and forties and which I felt deserved a rest after about the seventeenth time through. I came to this as a longtime admirer of Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, a much superior book which contains all of the sublimity without the logorrhea, anachronistic politics, and nonsense passages. As a young man, I would have loved this wholeheartedly; as an old man I appreciated much of it but wish it hadn't taken me the better part of a month to read.… (mais)