This unusual debut, the first novel to be published simultaneously
in hard-cover and as a paperback in Penguin's "Contemporary
American Fiction" series, suffers from a severe case of manic
impressiveness. Wallace, a recent Amherst grad, is something of a
puerile Pynchon, a discount Don DeLillo, and even a bit of an
original. Brimming with subplots, stories within stories, countless
one-liners, and a cast of characters worthy of some sort of
postmodern Dickens, this bulky fiction, when it isn't plain
tedious, seems to he a big inside-joke. Almost every male in the
book went to Amherst, from Rich Vigorous (class of '69), the head
of Frequent and Vigorous Publishers, to Andrew Sealander
"Wang-Dang" Lang (class of '82), a former frat boy and campus
swell, now married to Mindy Metalman, a "Playboy-Playmatish JAP
from Scarsdale," whom Wanger met one night on a roll to Holyoke.
But that doesn't begin to explain how Vigorous, with his abnormally
small penis, and the strapping preppy meet in Amherst in 1990, the
year in which most of this self-consciously strange book takes
place. The connection between them, and between just about everyone
else here, from sexy Candy Mandible to cruel Stonecipher Beadsman
III, is the former's roommate and the latter's daughter, Leonore
Beadsman, an overeducated switchboard operator at the Bombardini
Building in Cleveland, Ohio. That's not far from the corporate
headquarters of Stonecipheco, the family-owned baby-food company in
fierce competition with Gerber's. Also nearby is the nursing home
from which Leonore's great-grandmother, a former student of
Wittgenstein (that "mad crackpot genius"), has strangely
disappeared, thus setting into motion the hyperactive narrative.
Jokes about fiction by "a nastily troubled little collegiate mind"
should give readers further reason to pause. Wallace dabbles in big
ideas, with too many pseudo-Wittgensteinian pauses ("'. . . .'")
and much callow satire on consumer/evangelical America. Despite
flashes of real genius, it's a heady Animal House vision. (Kirkus
Reviews)
A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian and as serious as it is
possible to be without accidentally writing a religious text. He
can do anything with a piece of prose, and it is a humbling
experience to see him go to work on what has passed up till now as
"modern fiction". He's so modern he's in a different time-space
continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him' Zadie Smith The
mysterious disappearance of her great- grandmother and twenty-five
other elderly inmates from a Shaker Heights nursing home has left
Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman emotionally stranded on the edge of the
Great Ohio Desert. But that is simply one problem of many for the
hapless switchboard operator, seriously compounded by her ongoing
affair with boss Rick Vigorous; the TV stardom of her talking
cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler; and other minor catastrophes that
threaten to elevate Lenore's search for love and self-detemination
to new heights of spasmodic weirdness.
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