"[W]hat you'd expect from a guy whose first Newsweek piece compared
Cezanne to Ernest Tubb a surreal waltz across space, time and
cultures." Newsweek
"Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! As does Jack
Kerouac's Old Angel Midnight, Plagens's first novel opens with
God/the Universe/the Ghost/the Big Enchilada pouring HimHerself out
onto the page in Quack strange rhyming riverrun past Eve and Adam's
tumbles (if Quack language, it's Friday night in the cosmos, and
since first-novelist and painter Plagens is Newsweek's art critic,
you can count on him to fancy up the King's English with slippery
opening storyless ultralonggliding Beckettian paragraphs that
struggle toward some kind of focus and a tale to tell. The
Ghost/Billy Lockjaw leaves Manhattan for hometown Mylar, North
Carolina, to write his second novel, his first having been fodder
for Times Book Review novelist-reviewers reviewing
novelist-reviewers, and his lyrical pages having fallen like a
forest pine heard only by chipmunks. Readers bereft of a book
reviewer's stamina may start on page 48, where the novel proper
begins, as we enter the monologual mind of Billy's hero Robo, a
white, ex--ABA basketball player who had a freakish gift on the
court: He could disappear and reappear midair with a slam dunk, a
feat no camera ever caught. Then a centuries-old, magical portrait
of the Virgin and Child (that speaks with the Voice of God)
suggests various dates when the world will end and falls into the
hands of immigrant Serge Protector, which leads to the story of
antipapist California cultist minister Noam Sain, who preaches
Blowjobs for Christ. Plot fits within plot like Chinese boxes until
Robo's boxed for years into an aluminum trailer like a Beckett
character in a garbage can. Will Newsweek review this fitfully
amusing extragalactic word salad? Will God? Or Michael Jordan for
the Times Book Review? It takes courage it to write something this
originalturned down, Plagens says, by the majorsand let the
pine-tree roll where it may." Kirkus
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