3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mesmerizing up to the Final Scene, February 21, 1999
By A Customer
A bizarre and engaging book, ACTING ALONE tackles diverse social issues and political views. Told by an omniscient narrator in an exaggerated, witty, and suprisingingly realistic manner, the strange story unfolds at KA&M, a cow college in a place called Kanorado, where Sam Edwine, the protagonist, teaches as a reluctant graduate student in the English Department.
Sam's fascination with words and language parallel the narrator's complex sentences, which are often full of revealing symbolism and irony.
When Sam listens to a member of the "underclass" on one of many long bus rides, the drugged youth from Texas brags about putting a hammer through someone's skull for sugaring the gas tank of his truck. As the Texan tells his tory, Sam realizes that issues like this, especially over a sugared gas tank, no longer interest him. He thinks to himself, "You know you're approaching middle age when the proletariat ceases to fascinate you."
The irony behind this statement is that Sam engages in some of the same "low class" activities, such as bar hopping, getting into fights, and making scenes when he is drunk.
The less attractive part of Sam's personality shows in his stomach-turning strings of grammatically correct but derogatory language. For example, he expresses himself about the meaninglessness of research papers, dissertations, and theses:
"Just wipe some boogers at random on a half-ream or so of twenty-five percent rag bond, and the [expletive referring to professors] will probably congratulate you for 'abandoning sense,' or performing some other bit of nameless, jaded decadence that only crypto-Trotskyites who've read too many hardbook books can appreciate."
Obviously, Sam does not have high opinions of his professors or colleagues.
Sam's goal in life is to get published and become the next Edgar Allen Poe or Norman Mailer. To achieve his goal, he jumps at the seemingly perfect opportunity to become the ghostwriter for Sergeant Spikey Wamsutter, a Marine and newly released hostage of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Sam figures he has an inside connection to Spikey because his "best French/Irish A-plus girl," Shannon, is the sergeant's cousin. So he may become an in-law of the returned "ostrich"--Sam's word for "hostage."
Unfortunately, Sam finds Spikey, covered with yellow ribbons, growing yams at his parents' house in Kiev, Nebraska, and discovers that he rude, Spikey is sexist, egotistical, and intolerant of different cultures.
Spikey destroys Sam's nose and reconstructed harelip as a punishment for using foul language; then he confides to Sam that while in Iran he developed homoerotic desires for his captors. This does not improve Sam's impression of the character about whom is to write a book.
Taking pity on Sam, because she loves him, is Sister Polycarpana, a nun from the Convent of Saint Paphnutius. Polly, who turns out to be Shannon's big sister, is the feminist character of the story. She is strong-willed and educated, and she becomes a heroine at the end of the book because her strong character and persuasiveness help to keep Sam alive after he gets in a fight with KA&M's kickboxer, Bouncy. Her efforts are rewarded when she leaves the convent, headed by anti-feminist Chaplain Wagstaff Bopp, and joins Sam in the secular life.
After many twists and turns, Sam becomes a prisoner of Elder Cicerone, an apparently renegade Mormon who claims to be a writer's agent and asks Sam to write a psychosexual biography about a friend and kid Sam bullied as a child, Axelrad.
Growing up in Utah as a Jew and being tormented because of his small stature, Axelrad eventually became a brilliant arsonist and professional terrorist. Axelrad falls under the hypnotic spell of Elder Cicerone and joins in a secret mission to sabotage NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command), never quite knowing the details of the mad plot.
After a war on Cheyenne Mountain that resembles the end of the world, Axelrad is lost, and Elder Cicerone gets Sam to write a biography on the "little Jewish terrorist" in order to earn money for his secret mission.
These strange characters and their interesting relationships continue to mesmerize the reader right up until the surprising wedding scene at the end
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Merciless Humor and a Tireless Passion for Words, January 11, 1999
By A Customer
BOOK REVIEW by Dr. David Wood, author of A DEFINITIVE STUDY OF
In an age when literature is geographically unbounded and books are generically borderless, it is not strange to find Japanese novelists winning Nobel Prizes or even entering the hallowed ranks of English Literature in the country of origin. What is unusual is to find living American authors of megaproportions publishing first novels while resident in Japan. Tom Bradley is a professor of English at a national university, and he writes about his homeland with anything but an expatriate's nostalgia.
The back cover of this volume carries advance praise from two distinguished American novelists, and the present reviewer is quick to maelstrom spun from an imagination of superlative dimensions," and Stanley Elkin finds it to have "an incredible energy level."
Set in the Reagan era, Acting Alone features forays into such fanaticisms of the late twentieth century as politics, religion, violence and greed.
A merciless humor and tireless passion for words not seen since the King James Bible drive the novel at bullet-train speed through unmapped areas of linguistic elasticity and imagination. Readers once begun will find their concentration hostaged from all other diversions until they reach the last page.
None of the cast, from the "creative-writing industrialist" to the recently released Marine with sub-Marine life intelligence (whose lucrative memoir the former desperately wishes to ghostwrite), escapes the bombast of Bradley's parodic pen.
The trail of events twists and turns like a David Lodge diatribe dressed in Levis--from the seamy Sister Act convent (where Sam the writer finds his future partner, Sister Polycarpana) through the insidiously encroaching Mormon entourage, to the fossilized Jewish immigrant community, pogrommed victims of the Neo-Nazis who recruit hapless Spikey, the Iranian hostage folk hero, as their ingenuous hit person.
Chapters fade in and out via spiralling storylines and correlate characters whose viewpoints variegate the perspective of the prose with an almost Joycean jauntiness. With sure timing, Bradley brings it all to an apocalyptic climax, and a conclusion that is generous and, on the whole, earned.
But even more than the intricacies of the Catch-22 plot, the limits of language stretch beyond belief in a tumult of volcanic vocabulary, pinning the eyes to each paragraph in kaleidoscopes of creativity unmatched in contemporary fiction.
Mingling metaphors from modern popular culture (Casper the Friendly Ghost and Clint Eastwood) in the same breath with mock images of literary icons (defining standard fourth-grade languageas "Hemingwayesque" English) makes Bradley's Brave New Book a definitive must for fin de siecle fiction aficionados
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