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Out
Out is a novel of immense energy. Sukenick’s characters flash into and out of presence; episodes impel themselves so strongly that they are self-obliterating. This is an experiment in narrative and language; at the same time it is an extremely accurate, persistently funny portrayal of the psychic overload we all reached at the end of the sixties. Sukenick engages the full range of contemporary fantasy--revolution, conspiracy, pastoral nostalgia, Indian wisdom, demonic secret societies, and sexual extravaganza. These do not merely occur in the narrative but occupy it. Singly and in various rapid combinations, they add their manic energies to the book’s acceleration.Out begins in New York City, in full urban congestion. Its first characters are moving across a ledge with sticks of dynamite in their mouths--members of the total conspiracy. (“You’re either a part of the plot or the counterplot. Everybody’s got to be one or the other.”) They move towards meets --occasions when they’ll bundle their individual dynamites together and blow something up. The central character begins the novel as an arranger of these meets , conspirator and novelist. The novel moves out of New York and across the country toward the Pacific. The first moves occur with narrative furniture and transitional cardboard boxes, but as the book gathers speed and distance, these fall away.Out moves across the white space of its own pages, as well as across the country. The blank space expands until, at the edge of the ocean, the language disappears in blank space.Ronald Sukenick ’s first novel, Up , is still used as a model for innovative fiction, as is his second book of fiction, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories . Sukenick lives in California. Sections from Out have appeared in Chicago Review and Partisan Review .“ Out makes new rules for the forms of fiction. Like Sukenick’s earlier writing, the book breaks away from what we’re taught are the requirements of narrative only to show us how story really works.” --Carolyn Rand Herron, Partisan Review“Sukenick, or do I mean the character of the same name? is an urban, literary Jewish Don Quixote of our time...” -- The New York Times Book Review“And now, here comes the virtuoso of the season, Ronald Sukenick, a young man who can do just about anything with words.” -- Harper’s“Sukenick is an important writer not because he experiments, but because he writes out of our real situation. He knows the salient fact of our era--that all systems are fakes. This goes for aesthetic no less than political systems, and means that the writer is free to choose his own stance before reality, to tell his own story.” -- Book Week
- GenresNovels
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
1 person is currently reading
116 people want to read
About the author
Ronald Sukenick
32 books32 followersRonald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.
Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.
After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”
He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.
He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.
Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.
After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”
He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.
He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 23, 2018
You’ve Got to Get In to Get Out
I’ve been intrigued by Ronald Sukenick for a long while so as soon as I've found an opportunity to read Out I rejoiced.
The least I can say about this novel it is a book like no other…
A personage in Out says that he wishes to write a book that would be like a cloud, a cloud constantly changing its shape. And Out is this book… Or this cloud.
The undercover characters constantly change their code names and with the altering of the name their identity changes as well. They receive meaningless code messages and try to follow the pointless instructions so they’re walking the path of chaos that leads to the total deterioration.
Our world is through and through pervaded with the clandestine activities existing for no reason and serving to no purpose.
I’ve been intrigued by Ronald Sukenick for a long while so as soon as I've found an opportunity to read Out I rejoiced.
It all comes together. Don't fall. Each of us carries a stick of dynamite. Concealed on his person. That does several things. One it forms a bond. Two it makes you feel special. Three it's mute articulation of the conditions we live in today I mean not only us but everybody the zeitgeist you might say if not the human condition itself and keeps you in touch with reality. This is your stick. Don't fall.
The least I can say about this novel it is a book like no other…
A personage in Out says that he wishes to write a book that would be like a cloud, a cloud constantly changing its shape. And Out is this book… Or this cloud.
The undercover characters constantly change their code names and with the altering of the name their identity changes as well. They receive meaningless code messages and try to follow the pointless instructions so they’re walking the path of chaos that leads to the total deterioration.
An army of agents has infiltrated everything there are provocateurs double-agents triple-agents no one can any longer distinguish plot from counterplot even the agencies. Everybody by now is either spy or counterspy it doesn’t matter which…
Our world is through and through pervaded with the clandestine activities existing for no reason and serving to no purpose.
January 29, 2018
Essentially the sister novel to Plus, if you read that McMasterpiece backwards. For those that know what that entails, RUN toward this sonofabitch. I can't really say much without ruining the best parts, but will say that the ending had me doing that 'hand-punching-car-head-liner-cuz-the-tune-is-just-too-goddamn-rockin' Lebowski move. Except, y'know, like all literary and shit.
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October 22, 2017
Suzanne Somers?
November 16, 2019
I actually just read a review of Sukenick's slightly more popular - though still largely unknown - work, 'Up' on a blog (http://inchoatia.blogspot.com/2012/07...), and it could almost be a word-for-word summary of my thoughts on 'Out'. I particularly commend its '"postmodernism is weird" is no apology' argument, and the discussion about Sukenick's handling of female characters. As this blogger writes, 'any book that I would think twice about before recommending to a female friend is a book that I would think twice about before recommending to anyone'. Indeed.
May 3, 2014
I dropped the book. Not awful ,it's just too weird
July 30, 2014
pretty much every chapter has a sex scene. also the book is really trippy. it ends so mysteriously too. I would reccomend this book to other people if it wasn't out of print.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews