Lacking Character
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Curtis White's long-awaited return to fiction reminds us that the founder of one of American literature's most vibrant and innovative movements is still the King of "transcendental buffoonery."
The story begins when a masked man appears in the night at the door of the Marquis, proclaiming a matter of life and death: "I stand falsely accused of an atrocity!"
Except he's not, really; he's just trying to get the attention of the Marquis (a video game-playing burnout) to help him enroll in some community college vocational classes. And so the exchange gets badly botched, and our masked man is soon lost in a maddening America, encountering its absurdities at every turn, and cursing his cruel fate.
In a time with the crisis du jour, White asks us to remember what it's like to laugh--to be a little silly even--in order to reclaim what used to be fundamental to us: the strength to create our own worlds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first novel from White (Memories of My Father Watching TV) in 15 years is a comic, absurd delight. The queen of spells dispatches a masked, Zorro-like courier to rural Illinois in order to deliver a message to the marquis of N (a thinly veiled Normal, Ill.). The marquis is down on his luck and spends much of his time playing Halo, but the message he receives from the masked man (whom readers learn is named Percy) is a request for the marquis to care for the masked messenger. Percy, it turns out, is a sort of subhuman puppet or animated doll created by the queen, essentially "lacking character" but possessing most of the other human traits necessary for contemporary suburban existence. The queen promptly forgets about her creation but eventually travels from the Hebrides to Illinois to find Percy performing "ritual abasement" in exchange for housing. The marquis, meanwhile, sends his grandson and manservant out on a rambling quest to find some money, or at least a job. In a metafictional sleight-of-hand, White gradually switches his authorial role from narrator to active participant in the story. White is a postmodern master, and in this wild satire he transforms the banal into magic.
