Q

by Bill Lavender

Fiction. Presenting Q, a hero for our times, who travels from riches to rags and back faster than the most intrepid entrepeneur. Born into upper-middle-class comfort but suddenly finding himself homeless and destitute, he learns to live on the street and to eat out of dumpsters. At first cowing and regularly beaten, he quickly toughens and becomes a legend of the street and the rails. His many careers include stints as a Christian (glossolalic) rapper, a yacht-hopping jet-setter, and mercenary. His improbable adventures are a parable of our age."Bill Lavender's Q is a charming, provocative, philosophical picaresque with attitude. In fact, on top of being a parable and an adventure, it's a very literary exploration of every kind of attitude you would or could want--towards fate, towards materialism, towards our precarious and thoroughly absurd and hellbent times--Q is a joy to read, and a joy to ponder."--Moira Crone"A Voltaire for our consumer society, Bill Lavender has created apicaresque novel that travels not so much from country to country as from book to book. At times poetic, at other times philosophical, it concludes with advice that is no less wise than when Candide first offered it to his friends centuries ago: 'Tend your garden.'"--John Biguenet

Genres: Fiction

198 pages, Paperback

First published July 4, 2013

About the author

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and a novel trilogy, Three Letters. He is also a publisher. He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, with theoretical writings appearing in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others.

His ground-breaking verse memoir, Memory Wing, dubbed by Rodger Kamentetz "a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece," was published by Black Widow in 2011. His novel, Q, a neo-picaresque view of the surreal world of the future, appeared from Trembling Pillow in 2013. A chapbook, surrealism, was published in 2016 by Lavender Ink. His Amazon author page lists most of his books.

Read an interview with Bill about his poetics and about the press at Jacket2.

He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

Reviews

[Elise · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I began reading Q, this is what I had to say: " I'm on page 60 of 198 of Q: I can't put it down! I am enjoying Q's surreal journey, and Lavender's crisp and lyrical prose carries me effortlessly along like an intricately woven magic carpet sailing into the night sky."

Q is an example of the hero's quest in contemporary times, the search for the self and our place in the world is at the heart of this story, and that search, along with some sharp writing and fascinating characters gives this story universal appeal. Lavender sets out to test a few absurd theories about capitalism/materialism that are like mother's milk to many raised in the U.S., so the story might even anger some readers who still naively live by the tenet of "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." I think those people deserve to be offended, challenged, mocked. After all, zippers were invented over a century ago, so no one needs to pull themselves up by any damned bootstraps anymore unless they just like banging their heads against walls (and many staunch capitalists do this repeatedly in the form of voting against their own best interests). So, as timely as Q is in our current political climate, I digress.

This is more than political satire and more than a monomyth. It is an adventure story that travels across literary history, so that we get to visit Genesis, Candide, Don Quixote, Heart of Darkness, "Young Goodman Brown," Moby-Dick, and Oedipus Rex (oh God, yes, even Oedipus--anyone else catch that?). When Q was good, it was very very good, but when it was bad, it was horrid. I was blown away by the first 60 pages because in those pages lurks a strange and gorgeously written story that I could lose myself in. A story like that allows anyone inside it--educated and uneducated, academics and dilettantes, regular folks looking for entertainment--all are invited. But at times when the story became a little too self-conscious and cleverly academic, where the story becomes self-reflexive, where readers were invited to fill in the blanks or listen to a diatribe by a stock character put there to represent a certain political or philosophical ideology, that's where the author lost me. As an academic myself, I am equipped to play these intellectual mind games, but I didn't want to. I just wanted a sincere and honest story, which is what I was given about 2/3 of the time while reading Q. Social criticism doesn't have to come packaged in philosophical mind games; just let the story do it's work. It was doing a fine job before it was interrupted.

So, maybe I am not the target audience for this book, or maybe I am, but I still recommend Q because of the beautiful 2/3 of the book I most enjoyed--the intoxicating and surreal story that was driven by gorgeous prose and interesting characters. I am giving Q 4 stars for those wonderful moments, so check it out! Q was a fun ride.

[Mitchell Bigelow · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the idea to probe the ultra-capitalist/materialistic attitudes "of our time" with seething over the top surreal images and situations could be a great one. This however felt like someone mashed together My Own Private Idaho and the worst overtones of Killing Them Softly and drained all the heart from the first one. All progression was arbitrary characterization to get from one overblown metaphor to the next. In the cloyingly satirical preface, the author/narrator condescendingly describes the preference of other (read: more successful) writers, who have reviewers in their pockets, for "the emotional and philosophical tribulations of the upper middle-class American" over "political thinking" when explaining his vision.

But the problem here - to me at least - wasn't so much that there was critique of "serious issues" but more that the critique itself was lazy/transparent. I liked a passage towards the beginning of the book that described a functionally brain-dead man who uncontrollably rants things akin to "freer the market, freer the people" - who the narrator notes ends up becoming a huge radio star and much more successful than all the other characters in the book. But as the book progresses Lavender hits the nail on the head through the dead horse several times too many for me. Police corruption, corporate greed in the energy sector, religious zealotry, irresponsible arms dealings and military engagements, and the secrets which sustain the status of the upper echelon of society are all dealt with in exactly the same uninspired way, and it grows quite tiresome despite how quickly everything moves from one outlandish scenario to the next.

[Nancy Dixon]

Best surrealist book of this year and years to come.

[Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful, whimsical, wandering. Glad I stumbled upon this one.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Q is a novel about out time here and now. Bill Lavender has caused me to rethink certain things about the world, about attitudes, and about myself. I enjoyed reading Q; but I seem to have difficulty describing it. Q is an upper middle-class man who was evicted from his home and family. He goes through many changes, from one if the poorest people to a very wealthy one. A very interesting tale!