The Ecstatic
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- $139.00
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- $139.00
Descripción editorial
Victor LaValle has already established himself as “one of the most eloquent voices of the approaching century” (Kirkus Reviews), a writer of darkly humorous tales full of haunting beauty, astonishing leaps of imagination, and language that “crackles and hums” (Chicago Tribune). The Ecstatic is LaValle’s debut novel, a startling tale of love, horror, sex, insanity, faith, morbid obesity, and the modern American family.
Something is wrong with Anthony—our 318-pound hero—and it’s getting worse. A monster has caught his uncle and his mother; now it wants Anthony. Mental illness has been transmitted through his family’s blood. The three women in his life—his mother, younger sister, and grandmother—find him naked and disoriented in his off-campus college apartment and take him home to Queens, each determined to fix him in her own peculiar way. But his presence soon turns their house into a semisuburban asylum.
Sweet but wickedly sarcastic, smart and heartbreakingly vulnerable, Anthony narrates his family’s surreal adventures through a world of grinning exploitation and fake cures, from storefront evangelists and neighborhood loan sharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. He corresponds with a dreadlocked Japanese militant, is haunted by a vicious pack of dogs, and tries to make his own horror movie, all in search of an answer to a question he doesn’t dare ask. Written in the tradition of misfit picaresques from Journey to the End of the Night and Invisible Man to A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, The Ecstatic is the revelatory story of a family trying to save themselves from a ravenous world and their own unraveling minds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Not since Chief Bromden has there been a misfit narrator as large and compelling as 315-pound Anthony, the voice of this captivating debut novel by LaValle, author of the story collection Slapboxing with Jesus. At the book's outset, Anthony's family finds him "living wild" in his apartment, expelled from Cornell University and suffering bouts of dementia. They bring him home to his African-American Queens neighborhood, which, like Anthony himself, threatens to tip from middle-class propriety to a state of shabby but colorful disrepair. There's the local loan shark, Ishkabibble; white-collar neighbors concerned about their lawns; a pack of roving dogs with keen noses for human weakness. Most important, there's Anthony's family: grandmother, mother and sister, "three versions of the same woman past, present and future," who are usually at war with one another. Anthony isn't the first mentally ill member of his family. His mother, unstable in her youth, becomes erratic again just as Anthony tries to parlay his vigor for housecleaning and his encyclopedic knowledge of low-budget horror movies into some sort of promising future. Throughout, Anthony reflects on his own condition and that of those around him in a smart, sad and honest voice. The narrative shimmers with his self-deprecating wit and unexpected images ("Her hair was a big loose spray of black semi-curls emanating from her skull like the sound waves of her rollicking conversation"). LaValle's first book left critics divided over whether it had the substance to match its mannered style. Similar questions may be raised this time around, but LaValle's sympathetic and original narrator is a remarkable creation.
