Jonathan’s Reviews > Sweet Adversity > Status Update

Holy crap the last hundred or so pages have just been brutal. While he is very much doing his own thing, I get echoes of Coover's Public Burning (the hallucinatory stuff), some of the dark parts of Vollmann's whore books, maybe Mano's Take Five...A lot of my friends on here really need to get a copy of this asap.

I think one of the reasons I am in love with this book is that, in a similar way to Ulysses, it has such sympathy for, love of, pity for, laughter at, tears over, our bloody messy painful stupid filthy fucked up beautiful humanity. And to do that in prose that just Sings, well that is rare indeed.

This is breathtakingly good so far. Seriously. Shades of Joyce and Elkin and Henry Roth and all sorts of other lovely stuff.

They lie back, open beers, and share them. Cinnamongiving night, soothing, sapfilled, stars teasing the deeps.

George splurges on gas stamps for a Sunday drive to Erie. Skyblue snoworchards. Villages rotting slush. White grapevines, far brown and red farms, the Nickel Plate freight flat out for Erie, blue steam vomiting on crystal air. Deep seat jouncing, rocksalt hard-ons. Millie's jiggle.