Distortion

by Stephen Beachy

It’s the 90s. Reggie, a young hustler, is bouncing around the country trying to stave off personal catastrophe. With his own drug-addled sense of history merging with prophecy, and his own destiny merging with something he begins to suspect is evil, the scope of the catastrophe seems increasingly cosmic in proportions. “Dad” was never a very good idea to begin with. Transmissions from “Mom” suggest an impossible distance fueled by nostalgia for unhappiness. In a landscape of airplane disasters, arson fires, viruses and the confounding stew of humanity in the backseats of Greyhound buses, his story intersects a variety of characters equally unmoored from the reference points and false hopes offered by a mutating social order. Encountering film directors, producers, aspiring actresses and refugees trapped in their own stories of impending doom, his unlikely ascent to something like fame begins to seem like a nightmare.

340 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2000

About the author

Stephen Beachy is a writer. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965. His first novel, The Whistling Song, was published by W. W. Norton with cover illustrations by Curt Kirkwood in 1991 and his second, Distortion, by Harrington Park Press, in 2000. Two novellas, Some Phantom and No Time Flat were published in 2006, from Suspect Thoughts Press. His fiction has been published in BOMB, Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly, SHADE, and various anthologies. He has written literary criticism for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

In October, 2005, he published an article in New York Magazine, exposing the writer JT LeRoy as the concoction of a woman named Laura Albert, with the help of her family members.

Beachy teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco.

Beachy is also a second cousin of biologist Philip Beachy and historian Robert Beachy.

Reviews

[Craig Laurance · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second novel by Stephen Beachy is a paradox: it's a difficult novel that's easy to read. A loosely structured, Altman-esque book, it follows the adventures of Reggie, a young, biracial, speed-addicted hustler, and the demimonde surrounding him. The novel follows him from L.A., where he
becomes a huge MTV star-cipher, to Florida. Along the way, we drop into the lives of his friends and families, perennial flies on the wall. Most of the characters are disenfranchised in one way or another--gay, poor, or ethnic minorities; they are not the usual denizens of complex, experimental novels. In this way, it recalls Samuel Delany's epic novel
Dhalgren. The quirky characters, which include a wandering punk-rock poet, a video-producer dying of AIDS, a woman who works with abandoned kids among others, are sharply delineated. The shifts in locale and points-of-view is often dizzying; it resembles both the frantic editing of a music video, and moreencyclopedic activity of hypertext links.

Woven into these densely interior vignettes are hallucinations and dreams sequences of the various narrators. At times, it's impossible to see where the "real" fictive world end and thedrug-and-dream-induced imagined parts begin. Part ofit has to do with Beachy's trademark drunken wordplay. The man is incapable of producing an uninterested
sentence. The imagery is always startling, the syntax and rhythms seductive. It is his verbal facility, more than anything, which provides the novel what structure it has. Somehow Beachy is able to create
intense character-driven fiction, and rich phantasmorgia simultaneously. His authorial voices--at once hip, goofy, and scary--waxes philosophically about love, family, film and video theory, sexual abuse and race. This novel is not for everyone--the barrage of images can lean toward the extremely sexual and the disturbing. But those who opt to follow Reggie and his friends on their journeys will be moved. Imagine the trenchant social-realist fiction of Susan Straight or Jess Mowry thrown into a blender with the elegiac, drug-fueled fabulations of
Philip K. Dick, and Distortion might be the product.

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a biiig book, but so good you'll wish it was bigger.