The Deification

The California Quartet #1

by Jack Remick

To be a writer in America, you have to bleed. Eddie Iturbi, a young car-thief obsessed with the dark magic of Beat culture in a mythic San Francisco, sets off on a spaced-out crusade to connect with the Beat gods. En route Eddie links up with living legend Leo Franchetti, the last of the Beat poets. Leo sends Eddie to the Buzzard Cult, where a mysterious mentor reveals the writer's ritual of blood and words. Changed and invigorated and back in the City, Eddie falls in love with a snake dancer at the Feathered Serpent. She can’t save him from Scarred Wanda, jealous bad-girl of literature, whose goal is to destroy Eddie before Jack Kerouac relays all the magical secrets of the literary universe. Immortality is just a book away. Will Eddie live long enough to write it?

358 pages, Paperback

First published December 4, 2011

About the author

Novelist, poet.
Author of--
Valley Boy, Second Edition
No Century for Apologies: Short listed for the Hoffer Grand Prize 2023
Citadel, the novel
Blood
The California Quartet:
The Deification--Book One
Valley Boy--Book Two (first Edition)
The Book of Changes--Book Three
Trio of Lost Souls--Book Four
Gabriela and The Widow (Winner "Best Women's Fiction" Orangeberry Virtual Book Expo; Montaigne Medal Finalist; Book of the Year Award Finalist)
co-author of The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery (with Robert J. Ray)
Satori-poems by Jack Remick
Doubles in a Game of Chance--a novel about a bureaucratic nightmare and a lost protagonist on a thankless quest.
Man Alone--The Dark Book
Songs of Sadness Joy and Despair for the Anthropocene--a pen in one hand, a razor in the other (Long poems and Josie Delgado)

Reviews

[Blake Fraina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Jack Remick is obviously a serious student of literary tradition. His debut novel, Blood, invited comparisons to Camus and Genet, and his latest, The Deification, evokes the works of the brightest lights of the Beat movement - Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg. While not entirely aping them, Remick fairly approximates their various tones, from plainspoken stream of consciousness to outrageously surrealistic, and earns himself the right to be mentioned in their company.

In brief, this is the tale of Eddie Iturbi, a seventeen year old car thief and aspiring poet who moves to San Francisco in pursuit of his destiny - literary immortality. Along the way, he makes a lengthy detour to pimp for a tranvestite hooker, before landing a job at City Dreams bookstore working for Leo Franchetti, an aging and debauched Beat poet icon. Eddie is a unique and intriguing protagonist. Despite a damaging childhood and his criminal past, he’s what they call "straight edge" in contemporary cultural parlance - no drinking, no drugs, no cursing. Plus, he retains his virginity for longer than I would have figured. This is all rather unexpected in a book that otherwise reeks of all the usual macho tropes (sex, nudity, booze, drugs, violence, bodily fluids galore, hookers/strippers with hearts of gold…you get the idea). But no matter how weird things get, there’s something completely mundane and normal about Eddie’s reactions. When someone tells him something outlandish or metaphysical, his rejoinder is often, "I don’t know what you’re trying to say." Since I was thinking the same thing, I appreciated having someone in the novel to ask the question for me.

The first section of the book ("Canto One - Run Away Wild Boys") is completely naturalistic and very
Quentin Tarantino-esque with its depiction of the hardscrabble life on the streets. So it in no way prepared me for the direction the book takes once Eddie arrives in SF and Leo becomes his mentor. From his experience in grisly self-mortification under the tutelage of the gurus of the Buzzard Cult, to his back-from-the-dead experience at the grave of Jack Kerouac, to his symbolic trolley ride with long dead poet Villon, the book is chock full of weird, otherwordly episodes which comprise Eddie’s Christ-like journey to Deification.

Unfortunately, this is the story’s major shortcoming for me. I really enjoyed its more down-to-earth elements (particularly several almost soap opera style sub-plots involving both Eddie and Leo’s pasts), but, never having been a fan of Naked Lunch, I found the psychedelic aspects mostly just weird and offputting. I think by the fourth time Eddie was bleeding out of some incomprehensibly gruesome wound (inflicted by his friends and enemies alike) or the third time he was interracting with some long dead literary lion, I was about to throw in the towel. Personally, I would have preferred a bit more Kerouac and a bit less Burroughs.

[Educating Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Realism is a trap you fall into by will" (207)



The Deification is a complicated book for me to review. So much so that I waited almost two weeks AFTER reading the book to let it settle in. Just hoping that I would have this Amazing aha-moment and my opinion would become clear.

'Cuz man, I like the book. BUT then there were plenty that just rubbed me the wrong way. Like I kept thinking: Why go there!!! I don't care!!

Aiight. Let me break it down. What interested me the most about the book was the homage it pays toward the Beats. Man, I was IN LOVE with some beat generation poetry and prose. Especially the fierce tempo. Spoken word was a Ginormous thing for me when I was in college. Not that **I** ever performed. Geez no. But I would spend many a night in a dimly lit, smoke filled coffee house drinking cheap beer and getting inspired. A close friend was a performer and man was he pure s3xy on stage. So anything that starts as a quest to be a part of The Movement I'm gonna read it. Even if it's merely for nostalgia.

Soooo...Deification, which means to immortalize, is a hero's journey. And the hero, like any good hero is complicated and tainted. Eddie is a teenager who has ran away from home to seek out his idol and last beat poet, Leo Franchetti. And it's during this road trip that leads him to one of my all-time favorite minor character, Layne.

Oh Layne.

Let me tell you what. Layne is such a powerful character. Eddie picks him up at a gas station. He's a wandering tranny doing tricks to make it. Unlike the usual protocol where minor characters are used to serve as movement in Plot or externalize a Trait in the main character, Layne was FULL ON FLESH AND BONES. And man did he bleed both figuratively and literally.

Unfortunately he was only in the first canto. Oh yeah, didn't I mention the book was divided in four cantos? Trendy, pretentious, or innovative?

Eventually Eddie does come to find Leo and although reluctant at first, Leo takes him under his wing. Eddie's first task:

"Read everything, Leo told him, because you need to know what great words feel like in your mouth. He looked up at the shelf- now half-read - of the masters. Read everything, Leo said, until your eyeballs burn. Read until your teeth fall out. Read it all because you're a keeper of the language, Eddie, a guardian of the Muse and if you let them the mongrel hordes of pseudo-poets will rape her and leave her for dead, so you read them all." (101)

The journey that Eddie goes on to become a poet is imaginative and filled with magical realism. Love it! There are moments that are total WTF-ery, but in a good way. I immediately associate it with the drug usage and acid trips of the Beats even though it is made clear from the get go that young Eddie neither drinks or uses recreational drugs.

All of these mystical excusions I adore but then about two-thirds of the way thru the book, the journey takes a very realistic and somewhat awkward turn. Eddie's post catches up with him and we're finally told why he ran away. Except. I. Didn't. Care. It was like I was cruisin' down the highway at 55 and then at the next curve in the road, the speed limit immediately drops to 35 without any warning. You're screwed. You've gotta hit the breaks if you even wanna attempt obeying the law.

I guess what I've heard as the biggest oh no he didn't moment was the end. But I didn't feel that way at all. It made perfect sense.

This appears to be a series, and this is one of book four. But don't let that worry you. I don't know if I'll race out to get book two when it's published and I'm okay with that because this one has left me satisfied.

[Danika Dinsmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young poet's search for immortality and all the sad-beautiful-mad humans that are in and on, and at the end of, his path.

It may be a book for artists and writers and poets and musicians. It's not going to be the book for everyone. There's a lot of rawness here and a lot of bodily fluids. Sometimes I was in love and repelled at the same time - in a good way.

I loved how it floated in and out of the real and surreal and metaphor like changing socks. The rhythm and voice are completely authentic; I felt like a voyeur reading it, as if the writer himself were showing me his wounds. And most likely he was, because he's a poet.

It is an homage to the Beat poets, and recreates contemporary versions of Kerouac and friends. It's also part of a quartet of books. Of the second book, reviewer Jodi Lea Stewart said, It is as though I have stepped back in time to the days when writing was truly an art form and not a scientific venture into so much of a percentage of dialogue vs. action vs. narrative. No worries as to whether or not an agent or editor or some "god" of the publishing world will approve or not approve... raw, exquisite writing talent splashed onto the page with such audacity and nerve that it gives you a heartache that burns a hole right through your spirit.

I hope Jodi doesn't mind me borrowing her quote. I honestly could not have put it better myself. Heartache is the perfect word, and it feels like I have to recover from the first heartache before I can read the next one. It's definitely a book I want to have time for, take my time with.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jack Remick writes about a journey through the center of the Beat Generation. No stone is unturned as Eddie Iturbi’s very core is wrenched from within, laid out and dissected on a cold slab. Eddie skids along a twisted road of mind-bending drama where characters reek of the human condition in an era featuring drugs, sex and jazz. Remick’s main character starts out as a naïve and hopeful young man who wants to be a poet like Jack Kerouac more than anything else in his life. We watch his transformation as he maneuvers his way through the underbelly of street life, a desperate yet cunning survivor. Does he make it? You’ll have to read Remick’s labyrinth through hell and back to find out.

[Priscilla Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

If American literature produces one On the Road per century, then The Deification by Jack Remick is it for the twenty-first century. This saga of the road trip of would-be poet Eddie Iturbi from Sanger to San Francisco, from innocence to art, is fast, hot, thick, mythic, erudite, erotic, and intense. The prose is lush, the story, irresistible. Remick inscribes these vivid, gender-morphing characters on the California landscape as if they'd always been there. I believe The Deification will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing, thinking there would be a lot revelations considering there was some pomp and circumstance with the author's genre, supposedly equaling that of Kerouac. Story often takes a left turn, so there is nothing boring about. And, never a happy ending.