White Jazz

by Charles Newman

A New York Times bestseller and one of the Times 's 100 "Notable" Books of the Year, White Jazz is a week in the life of the Sandman, seven days spent cruising the labyrinth of computer circuitry by day and the chaos of disco humanity by night.

213 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Charles Hamilton Newman was an American writer, editor and dog breeder. Newman’s best-known work is The Post-Modern Aura, a scathing critique of contemporary culture that, unusually for a work of criticism, was reviewed and discussed in over thirty magazines, including general interest publications such as Time.

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Odd little book. Ecstatic use of language, almost a precurser to someone like David Foster Wallace. But it has aged plotwise following a week in the life of a late 70's/ early 80's playboy womanizer type as he goes nightclubbing for pickups when not using his CB radio(!!) or at work where he is involved in some sort of early computer programming. One good amusing scene where at a night school writting class he gives an alternate ending to Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls.
Am currently reading his 1971 novel The Promisekeeper, and have found that there is description and almost an entire scene of a dispute between lovers that he reused from that novel here.

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Discovered Newman's In Partial Disgrace last year and have been working my way back ... suffice it to say, his earlier stuff is second-rate 1970s/1980s high postmodernism, echoes of Delillo and Pynchon but not really much depth (or even enjoyment) to be found. Newman's prose wizardry is impressive but these earlier works fall flat, I think.

One curious thing . . . White Jazz is strongly reminiscent of DFW's Broom of the System, I wonder if Wallace was a fan of Newman? I guess he mostly worshiped Delillo in the 1980s but maybe . . .

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

ATT: You are reading a pro forma Transmission from the Godhead of Retroactive Reviews 2025

I have no idea why I didn’t write anything about ______. It was so fucking _________ and _________ that, possibly, I was at a rare loss for words. Or maybe I was on the lam. I can’t remember; hey, it’s been a few since ___________ and I crossed paths.

(If you’re reading this, this is a form letter—a placeholder, if you must—done retroactively as a stop-gag corrective of historical wrongs I committed by failing to uphold my end of the book-reader compact. That compact, my own, dictates that I record SOMETHING/ANYTHING (not a Rundgren reference, but…) to mark my engagement with a given novel/work/etc. at a fixed time in my personal life history. These ‘reviews’ are not really reviews (no shit, I know) at all; their purpose is that they act as pretty accurate reflections of where my head/heart was at the time of engagement. It’s something between the book and I, and a good way to check your hubris from time-to-time. If you find any part of it enriching, that’s a wild compliment. If not, you can just feel free to move along—I can almost guarantee that no offense was genuinely intended. Almost.)

So, clearly, __________ pretty much made me revaluate my entire __________________________ and _________ edifices, those false shells I’d enacted over years to protect whatever core ‘me’ I felt uncomfortable exposing. And it is so fucking _______! The _______? Unbelievable, right? Good/bad times…Ahhhh. Anyhow, __________ by ____ _________ obviously deserves a reread to inform a proper write-up. In between now and whenever that reread happens (foregoing death or living on the lam again), all I can say is ___________________.

I know. That’s why I’ll be back.

X Cody
10.25

RATING CHOSEN AT RANDOM; NO ONE CARES

[Bryan Fox · Rating 1 out of 5]

A largely unintelligible bowl of word soup - the blurb on the back cover could have been lifted from another book altogether, and you wouldn't really even know it. Like a poorly-written, more obtuse Pynchon (and Pynchon is pretty damn obtuse and poorly-written, for me).