A 2013 Books of the Year -Times Literary Supplement & John
Ashbery
6 Great Books to Read-Readers Digest
19 Books You Shouldn't Have Overlooked in 2013-Slate
An impressionistic portrait of literary subjectivity...revealing
the opportunities for pleasure and refuge available to the
inveterate reader. - Lambda Literary
A masterful act of literary ventriloquism. - Huffington Post Books
Inspired by the task of unpacking his library, the narrator
returns to writing an autobiographical novel about the sudden
appearance his son, Joe, who at age nine shows up on the narrator's
doorstep for the first time. The narrator, unnerved by the prospect
of sharing his life with his extremely precocious child, is
nonetheless moved by Joe's arrival. He has to change his own life
by accepting the responsibility of fatherhood, a role he shares
slightly with his young English boyfriend, David. Joe's
unpredictable mother, Eleanor Sullivan, seeks her own
satisfactions. The domestic scene is affected when David introduces
a new friend, Roy Hardeman, a strange gay cop who dies as
mysteriously as he arrived. The heart of the novel is the ghostly,
persistent, unreliable qualities of literary and personal memory,
and the ways in which a narrative can hold onto, recapture, and
transform memory.
Rick Whitaker's semi-autobiographical novel, An Honest Ghost,
consists entirely of sentences appropriated from over 500 books.
Whitaker limited himself to using 300 words per book (in accordance
with Fair Use); never taking two sentences together; and never
making any changes, even to punctuation. In the iBook version,
touching a sentence brings up its original source: a book's title,
author, and page number. The experience of acknowledging each
sentence as literary artifact, combined with the imagined accretion
of books that built An Honest Ghost, deftly mirrors the burgeoning
nostalgia in the narrator's voice and, fittingly, in the careful
reader's heart.
MORE PRAISE Rick Whitaker's An Honest Ghost is both narrative and
objet, a singular work of art whose singularity keeps beckoning to
the reader. He has put the force back into tour de force. - John
Ashbery, poet and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal
for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
Reading An Honest Ghost is an exhilarating, percussive experience,
proof that literature is capricious and exalted... People always
praise fiction for being lifelike but Whitaker proves that fiction
is better than life - more interesting, much more thrilling, though
it is inhabited by posturing, irresponsible, self-dramatizing
characters.... The tension and excitement of this prose, constantly
buffeting the reader, derives from all the different and unique
authors who have contributed to it. - Edmund White, novelist and
recipient of Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award
An Honest Ghost is sheer genius, the uber novel, the ultimate
palimpsest. It is a writer's truth and a reader's dream. Above all,
it is a uniquely gripping read. - Jenny McPhee, author of A Man of
No Moon and No Ordinary Matter
I am struck by how deeply personal this book feels, even
revelatory, as if the author had solicited other voices to perform
an autopsy on his most private, intimate self.... Whitaker has
performed such a work of genius and pushed it ad absurdum: the
extreme bending appears effortless and forms a perfect circle,
wherein full authorship of book, i.e. all the citations at the end
of the book, are truly at the discretion of the reader, with all
the responsibilities, pangs and joys this entails. - Filip
Noterdaeme, artist, author of The Autobiography of Daniel J.
Isengart
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