Bedlam Burning
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed author of Bleeding London spins a yarn of academia, lunacy, and the blurry lines between them in this Whitbread Prize–finalist novel.
It all starts at Cambridge University, where Dr. John Bentley throws his book burning parties—“a little active, symbolic literary criticism”—in which guests are invited to state their grudges against their least favorite books, and then toss them into a fire. It is at one such party that the brilliant but sheepish Gregory Collins meets Mike Smith, a handsome classmate. They become fast friends. And then their friendship takes a decidedly strange turn.
When Gregory’s first novel, The Wax Man, is published, he convinces Mike to take his place on the book jacket. Now Mike is the one invited to be a writer-in-residence at an insane asylum run by Dr. Eric Kincaid, whose obscure therapeutic philosophy centers on the soothing powers of literature. When Mike compiles a book of the inmates’ writings, and it becomes a literary success, this comedy of errors threatens to take another, far darker turn.
“Completely addictive and very, very funny. Great.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of A Gambler’s Anatomy
“Donald Westlake meets Ken Kesey in this . . . compulsively good read.” —Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The English comic tradition has always shown a fine weakness for a little lunacy, and Nicholson's 13th novel (after Bleeding London, a Whitbread Prize finalist) is the latest variation on that theme. Michael Smith is a handsome Cambridge graduate working a dead-end job at a rare book dealer's in the mid-'70s. Fellow grad Gregory Collins has written a novel and wants to use Michael's picture for the author photograph. The hoax gets more complex when Gregory persuades Michael to continue the imposture by giving a reading of the novel at a Brighton bookstore. In the sparse audience, which includes Michael's disapproving girlfriend, Nicola, is a gorgeous psychiatrist, Alicia Crowe, who persuades Michael-as-Gregory to be writer-in-residence at a local lunatic asylum. Michael accepts for two reasons: he's bored at the bookstore and wants to bed Alicia. The real Gregory approves, partly because he's slept with Nicola. Michael finds the Kincaid Clinic to be as strange as one would expect, and his attempts to turn a colorfully psychopathological crew into creative writing students eventually bears prolix fruit. He also discovers the dubious joys of making love to Alicia, who is a coprophemic a dirty talker. Michael finds Dr. Kincaid's extreme regulations unsettling: Kincaid bans pictures, photographs and drawings from the asylum, because, as he explains, the patients "have all seen too many images." The fragile situation begins to fall apart when a selection of the inmates' writing is actually published. The ensuing attention blows Michael's cover, but will his former Cambridge professor, John Bentley, unmask him? Nicholson's book, like a Fawlty Towersepisode, delightfully stretches sanity to its farcical breaking point. Film rights optioned by New Line Cinema.
