Idea of Home

by Curtis White

In Curtis White's first novel, The Idea Of Home, he attempts to imagine "a place in which humans can live." This utopia is definitely not San Lorenzo - a post-war, prefabricated suburb in California - where White grew up and which is the basis for this novel. From the vantage point of anoff-kilter adulthood, White spins recent American history together with personal observations and investigations into the dark heart of American suburbia. Shocking, yet very funny and always learned, The Idea Of Home is a mix of the personal and the philosophical in an energetic collage that would resemble the biographies of Nietzsche and Mark Twain if they had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and '60s.

Genres: Fiction

203 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sardonic, whip-smart novel in the form of stories sometimes linked via San Lorenzo sometimes not. White’s novel Requiem pushes this form to its apogee—this reads like a tantalising warm-up to that opus. White needs more readers from Goodreads in the Coover Sorrentino et al crowd. Snap to attention.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRE-M...

[🐴 🍖]

bizarre to call this a "novel," & i wonder whether that was white's classification or sun & moon's. anyhoo assuming one doesn't get too hung up looking for cohesion, my dude finds a lot of neat ways here of poking at assorted american mythologies' soft bruised spots... more often than not cronenberg type body horror is what lies just underneath. likening conformity to a sausage casing is gonna stick with me i feel. kinda gives a whole new meaning to "get stuffed"

[Brent Hayward · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of sardonic reflections, memories, historical tall-tales and other fantasies loosely orbiting a boy growing up or having grown up in the vapid Californian suburb known as San Lorenzo. Curtis White was an awkward and smart boy. He thought a lot about baseball, girls, and the terrible things one race can do to another in the name of so-called progress.