3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Elegaic Feelings American, June 27, 2006
This review is from: The Book of Jon (Paperback)
Father's Day, I was in Santa Barbara visiting my daughter. We got sandwiches on lower State Street at the Greek Deli, which, along with Joe's Bar (one of the places I used to look for my old man), I told my daughter that was about all that was left from the 60s and 70s when lower State was Santa Barbara's skid row, and her grandpa lived in the YMCA in that's now a parking lot across from the Greyhound Depot. I could see the more I went on about it, anyway, the distant past held little interest on a day when the sunny boulevard was full of tourists and students shopping boutiques, hopping from sports-bar to dining on tapas in fountained patios. I shut up about her grandfather (who everyone else recalls only, when they bother, as the most essentially alcoholic of men), unable to shake his ghost in parking lots and single occupancy furnished rooms that no longer exist.
I read this book dutifully, thinking, "Okay, I'll do my duty---but we've lived this story, so do we have to read about it, too?" My guess is yes. We haven't heard the end of it yet, and we haven't heard about it in this way before. The untold stories, post-mortem dreams and oblique inferences Sikelianos composes for THE BOOK OF JON cast smoky shadows of hope in the pungent colors of lived experience. Instead of another regurgitated tell-all memoir in the genre as currently marketed, instead of detailing in conventional melodramatic or operatic naturalism the body blows causing the wind to be knocked out of all the childhoods under these kind of fathers, Sikelianos structures THE BOOK OF JON tellingly and evocatively through elision and inference juxtaposed with a poet's snapshot-apt observation. Someone close to me (who's back in rehab again at the moment) once yelled at me, "Never, ever write anything about me! My problems are not the subjects of your poems!" And Sikelianos's BOOK OF JON isn't playing back her father's self-destruction for dramatic effect, for an evening's entertainment. She's not selling her own damage for the sake of authenticity in the market for reminiscences. Instead, with hard looks and casual bluntness, she's made a book of beaded moments that blesses both father and daughter even-handedly. THE BOOK OF JON honors that difficult duty. Its courage reminds me of another memoir, William Stafford's DOWN IN MY HEART, which describes a poet-turned-firefighter's experiences as conscientous objector during a popular, and perhaps necessary, war.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Doomed vernacular, May 6, 2005
This review is from: The Book of Jon (Paperback)
while our backgrounds are somewhat different, I could relate pretty explicitly to the world from whence this book comes--a kind of poisonous vernacular. And also the subject matter: the father as an unreachable, doomed anti-hero. Sikelianos engages with the subject matter in a vital fashion, interacting with it on its own terms, but never becoming poisoned by its refulgent mediocrities. A kind of postmodern rethinking of "On the Road," peering unflinchingly at the realities behind the myth of "rugged American individualism." Though it atones all involved with its reaching, a kind of absolution by way of narrative blurring, an alchemy that turns plastic fake wood panelling into gold...
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