The Node

by Tito Perdue

Welcome to the future. The 21st century has come of age and it seems that everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Propelled beyond the brink by environmental catastrophe, by cultural degeneration and the foretold collapse of the monetary system, the American landscape has given way to a postmodern picaresque. In such a world, where crime has been normalized, sex has been mechanized, and where ethnic enclaves equipped with inscrutable bio-engineered surveillance gadgetry vie for the last remnants of power, one hapless pilgrim stands athwart the apocalyptic tide. Emboldened by dim nostalgia and quixotic resolve, this man -- our hero, as we may insist -- will marshal a fractious retinue of co-ethnic subversives (the maligned Cauks ) to establish a stronghold, a redoubt, a community ... a Node. It remains only to be seen whether the seeds of renewal might yet find purchase, or be left to ash.

Unknown Binding

About the author

Tito Perdue was born in 1938 in Chile, South America where his father, an Alabama native, was employed as an electrical engineer with the Braden Copper Company. Returning to the United States in 1941, his family settled in Anniston, Alabama, remaining there until his father's employer relocated to St. Louis in 1955. In 1956 Tito graduated from Indian Springs School, a private academy located south of Birmingham, and was admitted to Antioch College in Ohio, an institution from which he was expelled in 1957 for having cohabited off-campus with the former Judy Clark, also an Antioch student. They were married later that year, both at age 18, and are together still. This year at college is the subject of The Sweet-Scented Manuscript, published in 2004 by Baskerville Publishers.

Tito attended the University of Texas in 1957-59 and 1960-61, receiving the B.A. at the end of that period. His daughter Melanie was born in January 1959, in Austin, Texas. During 1959-60, he worked as an assistant bookkeeper in the financial district of New York City. He returned to New York after graduation from the University of Texas and was employed for one year as an insurance underwriter, an experience lovingly described in his novel The New Austerities published in 1994 to very good reviews.

Tito was employed by the University of Iowa Libraries in 1968-70, and then began work as The Social Sciences Bibliographer at Iowa State University, a position held for ten years ending in 1980. He then became Assistant Director of the State University of New York at Binghamton Library and left in 1982 to become Associate Director of Emory University Library. He was discharged from that position in early 1983 as a result of policy disagreements and opted to devote himself full-time thereafter to novel writing.

In 1991 Tito's first published novel Lee was issued by Four Walls Eight Windows, a small press in New York City. The book received favorable reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere, being declared "spellbinding" by The New England Review of Books and "a stunning debut" by The Los Angeles Reader. Among negative reviews, Publishers Weekly exposed the book as the work of a reactionary snob and revealed that "it sinks under the weight of its own pretensions."

In 1994 his somewhat experimental Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture was published, a story based upon the history of his forebears on his mother's side. Extremely favorable and extended reviews were provided by Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles; a Magazine of American Culture, and by columnist Jim Knipfel of The New York Press. In 2007 a paperback edition of Lee was issued by Overlook Press. Tito's most recent novel, Fields of Asphodel also appeared in 2007 from the same publisher.

Tito determined to become a writer as a result of having read the novels of Thomas Wolfe when he was an adolescent. Since that time he has been writing, or preparing to write (or resuscitating), for a period of about fifty years.

Depending upon the weather and the day of the week, Tito admires Orwell, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Hardy and the nearly-forgotten Ladislas Reymont. Among current American authors, he prefers Larry Brown, William Gay, and Cormac McCarthy. Tito's taste in music runs to Wagner and Mahler.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surreal satire about a dystopian future wherein many of the fashions and trends of today have moved to absurd extremes in a manner that seems to amount to something like a societal collapse. The story follows an unnamed protagonist who bands together with a small group dissidents who seek to establish a new order hidden and sequestered from the chaos of the rest of the world. Altogether the story was not entirely satisfying, but the prose is fantastically written and quite witty.