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Encyclopedia
This daring novel is structured as a series of alphabetical entries, complete with definitions, dates, verbatim dialogue, lists of objects, and cross-references, that the reader can use as he pleases. The dates of various events, given within the entries, carry the narrative forward, so that the reader is made aware of the ultimate fortunes of the characters by means of a multiple, interior chronology.
In the book, the author has delineated a literary community whose main points of concentration are New York City, Hoboken, New Jersey, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. The people are familiar enough--bohemians, failed poets, celebrities who maintain ties with their lesser-known peers, and the endless "artistic" hangers-on that such communities inevitably attract. What is not so familiar is that the author has contrived not only to write a book that is flashingly funny, he has endowed this community of letters with the bitter addenda that make his humor all the more poignant.
The basic story is of the desperate and unhappy love of Tom Jones, a young, aspirant poet, for Sadie Massey, a well-off girl who has flung herself into the several bohemias available to her, and embraced, with equal fervor, drugs, alcohol, art, and sexual promiscuity. Their love affair, and the background of mutual friends and enemies against which it is set, reveals a cross-section of urban artistic life that is limned with a clarity and acuteness that borders on the photographic.
Richard Horn is a native New Yorker. Encyclopedia was written over a two-year period when the author lived in Mexico. For the past year he and his wife have been traveling throughout India, and he is well into a second novel based on his Indian experiences.
In the book, the author has delineated a literary community whose main points of concentration are New York City, Hoboken, New Jersey, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. The people are familiar enough--bohemians, failed poets, celebrities who maintain ties with their lesser-known peers, and the endless "artistic" hangers-on that such communities inevitably attract. What is not so familiar is that the author has contrived not only to write a book that is flashingly funny, he has endowed this community of letters with the bitter addenda that make his humor all the more poignant.
The basic story is of the desperate and unhappy love of Tom Jones, a young, aspirant poet, for Sadie Massey, a well-off girl who has flung herself into the several bohemias available to her, and embraced, with equal fervor, drugs, alcohol, art, and sexual promiscuity. Their love affair, and the background of mutual friends and enemies against which it is set, reveals a cross-section of urban artistic life that is limned with a clarity and acuteness that borders on the photographic.
Richard Horn is a native New Yorker. Encyclopedia was written over a two-year period when the author lived in Mexico. For the past year he and his wife have been traveling throughout India, and he is well into a second novel based on his Indian experiences.
- GenresNovels
157 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1969
2 people are currently reading
84 people want to read
About the author
Richard Horn
1 bookRichard Horn was born on December 18, 1942, in New York City, the only child of Howard Horn, a proprietor in the textile industry, and Evelyn Horn, a Russian immigrant and former shopgirl in a midwestern department store who eventually rose to become vice president of the chain. Horn was a Class A chess player and an avid follower of sports, particularly boxing and baseball. In 1967, while living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, he organized a baseball team consisting of American expatriates like himself and Mexican locals.
With the advance he received from Grove Press for Encyclopedia, he traveled to India in 1968 and stayed for nearly five years. While there, he plunged into the study of Ayurveda, the traditional Hindu system of medicine based on diet, herbal treatment, and yogic breathing. During this period, while working on his second novel, he also wrote a number of travel essays which were published in The East Village Other, a popular New York City underground newspaper in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Horn returned to New York City in early 1973 and died in August of that year, a few months shy of his thirty-first birthday. The cause of death, reported by the city coroner, was, "suffocation pending investigation". According to a couple of sources close to Horn, to the best of their knowledge, no investigation was ever conducted.
With the advance he received from Grove Press for Encyclopedia, he traveled to India in 1968 and stayed for nearly five years. While there, he plunged into the study of Ayurveda, the traditional Hindu system of medicine based on diet, herbal treatment, and yogic breathing. During this period, while working on his second novel, he also wrote a number of travel essays which were published in The East Village Other, a popular New York City underground newspaper in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Horn returned to New York City in early 1973 and died in August of that year, a few months shy of his thirty-first birthday. The cause of death, reported by the city coroner, was, "suffocation pending investigation". According to a couple of sources close to Horn, to the best of their knowledge, no investigation was ever conducted.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 24, 2023
So original and so good. One of the true gems of 60’s counter-culture lit. You can buy the reissue here at Tough Poets Press. And if anyone can put the copy from Rick’s cover here on Goodreads I thank you!!!
http://www.toughpoets.com/horn_encycl...
http://www.toughpoets.com/horn_encycl...
July 5, 2023
Reading this book is honestly really fun!
It's sort of weird articulating why though, since most of that is down to its format rather than its actual story. The whole book is organized like an encyclopedia, with alphabetical entries explaining all of the characters, their relationships, their actions and interactions. I can only imagine that reading it like a normal book (as in, turning the pages one at a time and going from one entry to the next) would be tedious and confusing, but I decided really early on in my read to hop around and follow the entries' suggestions on cross-referencing. This made the whole experience really enjoyable, and it also meant that it was almost exhilarating to read at times - I would learn about an event, the characters involved, and every related piece of info all at the same time, in one big rush.
Although certain chunks of the story felt totally disjointed from others (did KLUTZ, OSWALD matter at all?), there were also several threads that spun out and twisted together in really satisfying ways - one of my favorite examples of this is the interplay between the entries for BOX OF KLEENEX TISSUES (LARGE), CROCHET WORK, STREET SINGER, DICED CHICKEN WITH ALMONDS, and TIFFANY, which all work in tandem to give a pretty complete picture of a watershed moment in one of the story's central relationships.
That being said, the story itself is mostly just... fine. If it had been written in normal prose, there's no way my rating would be as high as it is. There are plenty of novels out there about bored twenty-somethings who experiment with sex and drugs; I'm sure everyone reading this can fill in the general outline of the plot for themselves without me needing to say much else about it.
Also, the form felt somewhat self-limiting; every once in a while there would be some interesting tidbit mentioned, but with no way to follow up on it or learn more. The nature of an encyclopedia is that each entry has to be pretty focused, so most of the auxiliary information about characters or background events was either cut out entirely or just mentioned in passing, with none of the surrounding context clues that traditional writing may have. (The exception to this is any sort of sexual act that's mentioned, because Horn did somehow manage to find the space to expand on each one of those plenty.)
Another limitation of this form is that it got to feel pretty stale by the end - the exhilaration that I mentioned earlier means that there's no real build or climax to it, so at a certain point you're sort of just flipping through the pages and re-reading bits to check whether or not you've already read that entry. And eventually you realize you've finished them all, and then you're just done.
All that being said, the format is genuinely very fun - I'd definitely recommend this book as a nice way to spend a dull afternoon (and I'd also welcome any other suggestions that play around with format in similar ways, if anyone has any!)
It's sort of weird articulating why though, since most of that is down to its format rather than its actual story. The whole book is organized like an encyclopedia, with alphabetical entries explaining all of the characters, their relationships, their actions and interactions. I can only imagine that reading it like a normal book (as in, turning the pages one at a time and going from one entry to the next) would be tedious and confusing, but I decided really early on in my read to hop around and follow the entries' suggestions on cross-referencing. This made the whole experience really enjoyable, and it also meant that it was almost exhilarating to read at times - I would learn about an event, the characters involved, and every related piece of info all at the same time, in one big rush.
Although certain chunks of the story felt totally disjointed from others (did KLUTZ, OSWALD matter at all?), there were also several threads that spun out and twisted together in really satisfying ways - one of my favorite examples of this is the interplay between the entries for BOX OF KLEENEX TISSUES (LARGE), CROCHET WORK, STREET SINGER, DICED CHICKEN WITH ALMONDS, and TIFFANY, which all work in tandem to give a pretty complete picture of a watershed moment in one of the story's central relationships.
That being said, the story itself is mostly just... fine. If it had been written in normal prose, there's no way my rating would be as high as it is. There are plenty of novels out there about bored twenty-somethings who experiment with sex and drugs; I'm sure everyone reading this can fill in the general outline of the plot for themselves without me needing to say much else about it.
Also, the form felt somewhat self-limiting; every once in a while there would be some interesting tidbit mentioned, but with no way to follow up on it or learn more. The nature of an encyclopedia is that each entry has to be pretty focused, so most of the auxiliary information about characters or background events was either cut out entirely or just mentioned in passing, with none of the surrounding context clues that traditional writing may have. (The exception to this is any sort of sexual act that's mentioned, because Horn did somehow manage to find the space to expand on each one of those plenty.)
Another limitation of this form is that it got to feel pretty stale by the end - the exhilaration that I mentioned earlier means that there's no real build or climax to it, so at a certain point you're sort of just flipping through the pages and re-reading bits to check whether or not you've already read that entry. And eventually you realize you've finished them all, and then you're just done.
All that being said, the format is genuinely very fun - I'd definitely recommend this book as a nice way to spend a dull afternoon (and I'd also welcome any other suggestions that play around with format in similar ways, if anyone has any!)
February 13, 2020
Boring characters, dull story, sexually appalling, fascinating structure, clever ideas
March 6, 2009
Not sure exactly how I feel about this one. The form is exceptional; "Encyclopedia" is a novel written as alphabetized entries in a small, one-volume encyclopedia. It disrupts the traditional front-to-back convention of reading because the best way to read this novel is by following the cross-references in the entries, jumping from entry to entry and slowly unraveling the narrative. However, as interesting as its structure is, without it this book would be nothing more than a typical, poorly written 60's novel about sex, drugs and writers.
January 22, 2024
3.5 stars.
This was a fun read, mostly, as others have noted, because of the format. The story amounts to a bunch of artists wandering around NYC cheating and getting cheated on, boozing and getting high, so there wasn't anything exceptional there. The characters had some life to them, especially Tom, Blacky and Lane. But that brings me to an inevitable criticism, something I've noticed particularly from authors of Horn's time and place: the women characters are appallingly underwritten. The most fleshed out here, Sadie, is fleshed out mostly in the "she has sex with everyone" fashion, and except for her spiritualism and inherited wealth, there seems to be little else to her character. I've definitely heard those criticisms leveled at Kerouac, but I could overlook that shortcoming because he wrote so beautifully. With Horn, though he showed a lot of promise here, I feel like he really did himself a disservice by populating a book with so many male artists and not a woman artist to be seen. Regardless, I still had a great time reading this book, and in spite of my criticisms of authors of that time and place, I find a lot of their works to have an energy and excitement that overcomes the weaknesses. I highly recommend Encyclopedia as it's a great example of utilizing new forms for storytelling.
This was a fun read, mostly, as others have noted, because of the format. The story amounts to a bunch of artists wandering around NYC cheating and getting cheated on, boozing and getting high, so there wasn't anything exceptional there. The characters had some life to them, especially Tom, Blacky and Lane. But that brings me to an inevitable criticism, something I've noticed particularly from authors of Horn's time and place: the women characters are appallingly underwritten. The most fleshed out here, Sadie, is fleshed out mostly in the "she has sex with everyone" fashion, and except for her spiritualism and inherited wealth, there seems to be little else to her character. I've definitely heard those criticisms leveled at Kerouac, but I could overlook that shortcoming because he wrote so beautifully. With Horn, though he showed a lot of promise here, I feel like he really did himself a disservice by populating a book with so many male artists and not a woman artist to be seen. Regardless, I still had a great time reading this book, and in spite of my criticisms of authors of that time and place, I find a lot of their works to have an energy and excitement that overcomes the weaknesses. I highly recommend Encyclopedia as it's a great example of utilizing new forms for storytelling.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews