This easily wins the prize for the most bizarre novel I have ever read, or even heard of. It is fortunately not nearly as long as the number of pages would suggest as some pages have only a heading and one line of few words. Other sections consist of more than a full-page run-on single, bold-typed sentence heading followed by a few lines of nonsensical text. The author is a professor of English in the creative writing program at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; in retrospect that should have been a clue that I would not enjoy his writing. It is my impression, based on nothing but a hunch, that teachers of creative writing desperately try to outdo each other in weirdness and idiosyncrasy in their esoteric writing, forming a body of eclectic literature that us lesser mortals can never appreciate.
It is not just the format that is weird. It seems that a plot is optional and what little there is makes no sense, with many frayed loose ends; the characters are equally confusing. It is not clear whether it is the author or the narrating character that is in the manic phase of a bipolar disorder, unable to finish sentences, concentrate, or follow a line of thought, with a bad example of pressured speech. Or perhaps a paranoid schizophrenic high on magic mushrooms or LSD. Non-sequesters and garbled sentences abound. “I squirmed in a dream in which I encountered the space at the center of me that was not me. The space was made up of a form of matter that was so unstable that it was impossible to make a study of it just by being near it once. I touched its surface; my hand stuck. Space, I said, not moving my mouth, how are you in me but not me. Every window in the city broke….. I tore an alley down into itself. My hand broke off at the wrist.”
I should have given up at this point, but the lavish if somewhat muted praise by seven fellow authors on the jacket kept me going, hoping there was some hidden deep existential insight or at least something more than nonsense in this narrative. If there is, I missed it completely. On reflection, I realized that I had never heard of any of the authors praising this book, nor of their books. But a cursory online search reveals that at least five of the seven are teachers of creative writing. I rest my case.
The Passionate Reader 