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All Back Full
Act At a kitchen table, a husband and wife discuss the news, nudists, and lie to each other about the ways they no longer connect.
Act At a kitchen table, a man and his friend discuss the weather, the state of public transportation, and lie to each other for the sake of something to say.
Act At a kitchen table, three people discuss, mostly, nothing, and watch the threads unravel as their lives come apart at the seams.
Told in a genre-defying style that melds the depth of the novel with the honesty of the stage, All Back Full charts one day in a marriage at once usual and unusual, exploring what we say to each other when we say nothing, and the ways we speak to each other without words.
Act At a kitchen table, a man and his friend discuss the weather, the state of public transportation, and lie to each other for the sake of something to say.
Act At a kitchen table, three people discuss, mostly, nothing, and watch the threads unravel as their lives come apart at the seams.
Told in a genre-defying style that melds the depth of the novel with the honesty of the stage, All Back Full charts one day in a marriage at once usual and unusual, exploring what we say to each other when we say nothing, and the ways we speak to each other without words.
184 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 14, 2017
3 people are currently reading
90 people want to read
About the author
Robert Lopez
430 books22 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 17, 2017
Robert Lopez’s darkly comical collections and novels are full of bizarre, dissolute isolatos moving in and out of desultory relationships, talkative heads navigating through absurd situations, bleak states of mind and being, the mud and murk of day-to-day doldrums. All Back Full (Dzanc Books), Lopez’s fifth book, offers three such characters: a husband and wife and the man’s friend, who aren’t having it, who’ve had it with each other, each one talking to each other, talking at each other, around each other, as if the addressee weren’t there, as if they, the addresser, weren’t there, the “there” sometimes not there either, the “there” that’s sometimes there for the most part a nondescript kitchen in a “toxic” house.
Juxtaposed against the characters’ funny, odd, or banal conversations are these mini-encyclopedia-entry-like sections, among the subjects paraphilia, dolphins, Ancient Greeks, storm names, CPR, artificial respiration, asthma, Cape Cods and Colonials, Aristophanes, Georgia, seagulls, poodles, fibromyalgia, occupational therapy, trade unions, alcohol distillation, submarines, dementia, Ancient Carthage, Sherpas, the waltz, naturism, and more besides. You might think of these sections as screenshots of the husband’s “digital daydreaming”: the hours he spends drowning in—as opposed to merely surfing—the internet, getting lost in this or that “factoid.” They serve less as explanations than to make everything else far less certain, far more stressed, fractured, an array of fragments to shore against one’s ruins but no promises.
Subverting conventional dramaturgy, All Back Full interrogates what is arguably society’s most confining convention: marriage. How appropriate, if ironic, that it was published on Valentine’s Day. All Back Full doesn’t so much fuse the novel and the play as dissolve each genre, creating something not only different but disturbing, disorienting and reorienting. It’s that Barthelme-via-Oppenheim “strange object covered with fur,” which, in this case, breaks everything up and apart.
(This review originally appeared here: https://bigother.com/2017/02/28/on-ro...)
Juxtaposed against the characters’ funny, odd, or banal conversations are these mini-encyclopedia-entry-like sections, among the subjects paraphilia, dolphins, Ancient Greeks, storm names, CPR, artificial respiration, asthma, Cape Cods and Colonials, Aristophanes, Georgia, seagulls, poodles, fibromyalgia, occupational therapy, trade unions, alcohol distillation, submarines, dementia, Ancient Carthage, Sherpas, the waltz, naturism, and more besides. You might think of these sections as screenshots of the husband’s “digital daydreaming”: the hours he spends drowning in—as opposed to merely surfing—the internet, getting lost in this or that “factoid.” They serve less as explanations than to make everything else far less certain, far more stressed, fractured, an array of fragments to shore against one’s ruins but no promises.
Subverting conventional dramaturgy, All Back Full interrogates what is arguably society’s most confining convention: marriage. How appropriate, if ironic, that it was published on Valentine’s Day. All Back Full doesn’t so much fuse the novel and the play as dissolve each genre, creating something not only different but disturbing, disorienting and reorienting. It’s that Barthelme-via-Oppenheim “strange object covered with fur,” which, in this case, breaks everything up and apart.
(This review originally appeared here: https://bigother.com/2017/02/28/on-ro...)
June 17, 2018
"All Back Full" is a dryly comic, suburban, existential rant in three voices, with the addition of the voice of Wikipedia defining for us everything from fibromyalgia to Carthage. I love Robert Lopez's short fiction so much that I hesitated to read his novel. What works so well in a compressed form sometimes doesn't translate to novel length. Now I'm kicking myself that I denied myself the pleasure of this book for a year. Playing with very small scale, three unnamed people sitting around a kitchen table, the novel builds a pungent portrait of desire and desolation. Very quick but very deep, with no wrong notes. I particularly loved the passage of slugs across the driveway, the submarine lingo, and a putative movie of a woman cleaning a bathroom.
October 17, 2018
Horrible book. Went to a reading- was a prick. Fully said book means nothing but way for him to jerk off his ego.
May 14, 2017
I want there to be a new word for Robert Lopez's work.
There certainly are already many more than just one for his work. (I also want to underline the word work here, because it is serious and it is work and I can feel it, rather than see it, on the page – his work, not my (the reader's work) work, which in the case of All Back Full, I had to do no work, other than be in it).
I've read his work described as 'metafiction' and I know that term and I can see why some could apply that term to this book because it fits neatly into that description. But for my two cents, All Back Full is much more than metafiction. And IF it is metafiction, All Back Full and Robert Lopez are subverting Metafiction from within its neatly defined borders.
That's one reason why we need a new word for his work. Just one. We can slather on other old words, too, and they will be true, in some cases. But there is a word that hasn't been made yet for Robert Lopez's work and while we have to wait for its invention, Lopez is going to just keep on giving us the reasons why his work and his language deserve a new consideration. Not a new label! Just a name that does what a good name can do: give us a feeling of recognizing someone we so very much enjoy the fact that they exist.
There certainly are already many more than just one for his work. (I also want to underline the word work here, because it is serious and it is work and I can feel it, rather than see it, on the page – his work, not my (the reader's work) work, which in the case of All Back Full, I had to do no work, other than be in it).
I've read his work described as 'metafiction' and I know that term and I can see why some could apply that term to this book because it fits neatly into that description. But for my two cents, All Back Full is much more than metafiction. And IF it is metafiction, All Back Full and Robert Lopez are subverting Metafiction from within its neatly defined borders.
That's one reason why we need a new word for his work. Just one. We can slather on other old words, too, and they will be true, in some cases. But there is a word that hasn't been made yet for Robert Lopez's work and while we have to wait for its invention, Lopez is going to just keep on giving us the reasons why his work and his language deserve a new consideration. Not a new label! Just a name that does what a good name can do: give us a feeling of recognizing someone we so very much enjoy the fact that they exist.
October 17, 2018
This was about nothing. Not the topic of nothing, but nothing itself. I found the book pointless and meaningless. The book itself even tries to compare itself to "Much Ado About Nothing." Having read both of these. There is no comparison.
Additionally, the take on the characters by the narrator is strongly masculine to the point that it is sexist. I believe this perspective to be outmoded and without taste.
Additionally, the take on the characters by the narrator is strongly masculine to the point that it is sexist. I believe this perspective to be outmoded and without taste.
March 16, 2017
Great stuff.
April 18, 2020
Meandering and hard to keep track of the characters and what they do. Some interesting passages, but felt a little weird for weirdness’s sake to be enjoyable as a whole.
March 23, 2017
Wow! Totally different from anything I've read. At times funny, shocking, sad-- always fascinating, intriguing and provocative.
March 16, 2017
First thoughts after finishing book:
Ah, really dunno how to rate this one. it was good when you think about it because of its realness but dunno otherwise. haha.
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Originally appeared on Edelweiss and Gaga Over Books..
All Back Full was definitely weird. The writing style was definitely different. And/But definitely real.
I don't really know how else to review it. But just it did keep me wanting to not read it but then wanting to just know what else the characters would talk about. The writing style was different and it didn't really make us connect with the characters but that was the whole point: to lay the foundation of relationships. It was distracting but sufficient.
This book has the power to really sink it's underlying meaning or it can completely roll off but really the conversations these characters were having.. Goodness. At times I would go like, "... what the hell am I reading?..."
But I did get what this book or the author wanted to tell us. And I love the book for that. But I took a lot of time to get there in this really short book with three acts. Hence my 3 star rating.
This book is going to be a hit or miss with the readers. I am somewhere in between.
Special thanks to Edelweiss and Dzanc Books for this review copy.
Ah, really dunno how to rate this one. it was good when you think about it because of its realness but dunno otherwise. haha.
__________________________________
Originally appeared on Edelweiss and Gaga Over Books..
All Back Full was definitely weird. The writing style was definitely different. And/But definitely real.
I don't really know how else to review it. But just it did keep me wanting to not read it but then wanting to just know what else the characters would talk about. The writing style was different and it didn't really make us connect with the characters but that was the whole point: to lay the foundation of relationships. It was distracting but sufficient.
This book has the power to really sink it's underlying meaning or it can completely roll off but really the conversations these characters were having.. Goodness. At times I would go like, "... what the hell am I reading?..."
But I did get what this book or the author wanted to tell us. And I love the book for that. But I took a lot of time to get there in this really short book with three acts. Hence my 3 star rating.
This book is going to be a hit or miss with the readers. I am somewhere in between.
Special thanks to Edelweiss and Dzanc Books for this review copy.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews