Billy Verite [Hardcover]

Rick Harsch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1998

The second novel in Harsch's blackly comic La Crosse cycle, "Billy Verite" is a wickedly funny American fairy tale about war and love and death and the fall and rise of civilizations.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this rollicking adventure, Rick Harsch again displays the flair for sophisticated dark comedy and detective parody that earned him high marks in The Driftless Zone. In this second novel, Billy Verite, the title character is a former snitch, a failed gumshoe, an ugly man who believes he can succeed on style--his version of style. Enter Lola, a sexy, sneering moll who, for a variety of reasons, finds herself forced to hide out with Billy from a sinister underworld kingpin named Skunk. The two take refuge on a deserted island in the Mississippi River where Billy creates a fortress full of traps and homemade weaponry, bearing such names as Death Pit Six, Binocular Tree, and Forbidden Sector II. Here, he and Lola haphazardly prepare for their inevitable showdown with soon-to-be-mayor Skunk and two traitor cops who want them dead.

As Billy and Lola join forces against Skunk, the narrator takes over the detective work in a novel-within-the-novel, attempting to solve the mystery of a murdered prostitute while setting the stage for Billy's escape from a faltering seedy civilization to the twisted concoction of his own brave new world. Rick Harsch is an entertaining new author whose writing spins you between hard life and dark hilarity. --Susan Swartwout

From Publishers Weekly

Returning to LaCrosse, Wis., and several of the characters from his debut, The Driftless Zone, Harsch chronicles the rise of B.A.D., a motorcycle gang led by Skunk Forhension, a Lee Harvey Oswald look-alike with a penchant for talking his enemies to death. Preternaturally ugly PI Billy Verite is hired by undercover police officer Stratton to spy on B.A.D. but falls for Stratton's nymphomaniac girlfriend Lola (for all the stylistic inventiveness, Harsch writes women characters according to old-fashioned types). With seemingly intentional disregard for conventional plotting, Harsch removes Billy and Lola from LaCrosse to a nearby deserted island in the Mississippi River (an odd contrivance, given the region's abundance of hiding places). Billy builds a fort on the island and engages with Lola in various Huck-Finnish escapades of an adolescently repressed creepiness that detracts from Billy's already shaky position as the novel's moral center. Harsch's enjoyment of quirky rhetorical flourishes ("feary quietude," a "ribby chest," "his apperceptual doldrums") is distracting, although some of the many neologisms he sprinkles about the text are poetic (the inspired "Zorbic," from Zorba the Greek, for instance). Harsch obviously has talent, but in this novel he seems determined to spread it thin.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 263 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth Pr; 1st edition (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642922
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642921
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,548,129 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Harsch takes the reader on another wild ride., June 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Billy Verite (Paperback)

Don't be put off by the fact that Billy Verite is the second book in a trilogy: if you haven't read Harsch's quirky and brilliant first book, The Driftless Zone, there'll be plenty of chances to come. In the meantime, Billy Verite is provocative entertainment--funny, suspenseful, and sharply intelligent--and you shouldn't hesitate to pick it up. Then, if you haven't already, pick up The Driftless Zone. Despite its many connections to Billy Verite, Harsch's first novel is a different creature--more philosophical and poetic, while still containing enough hilarity, sex, action, and wild originality to split the seams.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Back to the Zone, But Even Better!, August 30, 1999

By 

Jason Snyder ([e-mail]) (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Billy Verite (Hardcover)

As much as I liked The Driftless Zone, I think Rick Harsch has topped himself with this one. He has a knack for creating unique, well-drawn characters, and has become a sharper storyteller. He also shows a strange affection and deep feeling for La Crosse's (Wisconsin) natural and unnatural wonders. After reading Harsch's first two books, I feel like I've been there for a six-month visit, even though I've never been within 500 miles of the place. Harsch promises Billy Verite is the second of a "La Crosse Trilogy" and I can't wait to return.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Check out Billy Verite: Elmore Leonard meets Mark Twain, August 1, 1998

By 

S. Foster "Caustic" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Billy Verite (Hardcover)

Mordant adventures along the Mississippi River with motorcycle gangsters, bar flies, unemployed detectives, victims of meaningless violence and violent meaninglessness, Rick Harsch unfolds the second volume of his grimly hilarious 'La Crosse Trilogy'. This time the 'hideously ugly' Billy Verite seizes the day when a friend, soon to be murdered himself, places in Billy's care the trenchant and maltreated Lola, endangered witness to crimes and corruption in the town, which is on the verge of war between rival gangs. Two corrupt undercover cops, Stratton and Torgeson, who first made their appearance in Harsch's excellent first novel, THE DRIFTLESS ZONE, reappear, as before, up to no good. It's in this milieu of vicious low life in a waterfront town that the decidedly unheroic Billy Verite takes action to reveal a comic, disturbing, non-standard heroism of sorts. As in Harsch's previous novel, Billy's tale is told with unexpected turns of language, plot and point of v! iew, fascinating juxtapositions of hard-edged realism and flights of fancy as in the early films of Federico Fellini, a harsh view of small town life in the middle of America enlivened and illuminated by close attention to local detail, fantastic insights into the existential pathology of the trapped citizenry of middle America at the end of the second millennium and a will to dark comedy. BILLY VERITE entertains with the best of Graham Greene's "entertainments," and we look forward to more.